A painting worth £100,000, a £3m house – and then there was the banker who picked up £5.7m. Are directors taking the mickey?

It was quite a retirement present. When Dame Marjorie Scardino stepped down as the chief executive of Pearson, she didn‘t depart from the publisher of the Financial Times with a gold-plated watch – she left with a £100,000 painting that had hung on the wall of her office.