James Crean shareholders will have the opportunity to grill their directors in the next couple of weeks, and one can only hope that some of those shareholders have the courage to stand up and ask those directors to account for their stewardship of the company.

The disaster that is James Crean has been well documented by now, but suffice to say that the Crean share is 10 per cent of its level 10 years ago. In that period, the Crean board has chopped and changed its corporate strategy, got into and out of businesses at heavy losses. And now remarkably, after the market has gone sour on small companies, Crean plans to make itself smaller by dividing in two.

One might think that such a dismal performance might be reflected in how much the Crean directors get paid. But on the contrary, the four Crean executive directors - Ray McLoughlin (below, left), Larry Westman, Martin Delaney and Matt Kwasek - got a rise of more than 17 per cent last year from a combined £850,000 to £1 million - an average of £250,000 each!

To add insult to injury, the four directors got a bonus, yes a bonus, of £197,000 on top of basic salaries of £706,000 and other benefits of £98,000. Traditionally, bonuses are paid to reward performance. Where was the performance in the case of the Crean directors? And if their £197,000 bonus was not based on performance, what was it based on?

"The group's policy is to ensure that the remuneration of executive directors is appropriate to the nature and size of the group's business and properly rewards and motivates them to perform in the best interests of shareholders," trumpets the directors' report. That doesn't say a lot, does it? Shareholders, who have seen the value of their investment collapse by 90 per cent in the past 10 years might have a different view.

So to help Crean shareholders who might be concerned that their directors are not bearing their share of the pain, Current Account has managed to extract a bit more detail on how the four directors are remunerated, although what Crean tells us still falls far short of IAIM guidelines.

According to Crean, neither Ray McLoughlin nor Larry Westman got any bonus in 1998 and the £197,000 figure in the annual report relates to bonuses paid to those directors involved in the American food business, which grew operating profits by 12 per cent, and the sale of Crean's non-core assets.

That's all very well, but it still does not explain why Crean feels the need to pay its directors so much. Crean might say that it has to pay the going rate to attract management talent, but there comes a time when management picking up an average of £250,000 a year either perform or move on.

Current Account has previously advocated that Crean follow the example of Jones and sell off all the assets and distribute the proceeds to shareholders. Shareholders might not be fully compensated for what they have suffered in recent years, but it would at least give them something with which to nurse their financial wounds.

Crean's own broker, Davy, has put an enterprise value of £118 million on Crean compared to its stock market value of less than £40 million. If anything like that enterprise value can be realised through a wind-up, then that should be the strategy for the well-remunerated board. Forget about splitting the company into two minnow companies.