It wasn't directed at you, I'm sorry if it came out that way: my claim about transparency was a relative one and not an absolute one and in fact I agree with your perspective that transparency even in government isn't as good as it could be in an absolute sense (in some cases, of course); it just doesn't have any bearing the point I was responding to, which is a direct comparison between public sector and private sector.
And very few top-level employees of very large publicly held companies consider themselves accountable to a very tiny elite group of wealthy shareholders. I don't think that this is what people mean when they use the word 'accountable' though. If you want to stretch the use of the word that far, you could say everyone is equally accountable because they are accountable to themselves, or religious people are more accountable because they consider themselves accountable to God while Atheists don't. I think it's fair to assume when someone uses the word 'accountability' in this context they mean to society as a whole.
I would also reject the notion that companies rely on consent more so than governments; they are dictatorships run top-down by generally a single manager who commands his underlings. Companies and governments are enormous bureaucratic organizations which have enormous impact on the societies in which they operate and the people that live in them. Government has checks and balances and voting and are required to publish information about their operations and are open to being changed by the general public (through voting). Companies are secret private dictatorships which do as they please without regard for the wishes or needs or desires of the general public (only when those wishes happen to coincide with a profit motive; a rare happy accident) and publish nothing about their operations by design.
I think it's quite fair to make the claim about relative transparency/accountability, that governments beat companies always; governments are required to try, companies do not even pretend to try (in fact the most profitable companies actively refuse to try). I think you have a very good point about how transparent this minimal transparency is in government, but the fact that it even exists means governments beat companies hands down every time.