Interesting. He's a multimillionaire CEO and couldn't be bothered to just pay for the dinners out of his own pocket, but expensed them to the corporate card instead? It must be good to be da king. Until you're not...
Maybe I can shed some light - this isn't a morality judgment either way, but perhaps it will explain the reasoning of people involved.
Every competent executive team or board that authorizes compensation pays attention to a person's "fully loaded cost" - that includes everything from their pay to their benefits to their expenses to the taxes they pay on the person. They do math on that number.
Typically, if an important team member wants to shift compensation from one area (salary) to a lower tax area (expense account, retirement account, benefits, whatever), the board will authorize that. They factor it into his fully loaded costs, there's just different taxes and accounting on it.
This doesn't get into rightness/wrongness, just people's decisionmaking. Companies know roughly what people spend on their expense accounts and have policies for it. Some companies make it only for "real" expenses, whereas other companies will let people accept lower salary but expense more benefits.
This isn't just for executives, by the way - companies that offer free food on-site tend to do the same kind of math, for instance. 401k investment plan matching, same kind of math again. Actually, moving $10k from salary to benefits might lower fully loaded costs, due to the way the taxes and accounting works. This doesn't get into rightness/wrongness, just the practical aspects of it.
http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/37608: "The use of a corporate jet is often required by corporate policy intended to protect the executive from the threat of violence or abduction. "
http://www.swamppolitics.com/news/politics/blog/2008/11/auto...: "Most corporate CEOs in companies with corporate jets are REQUIRED to use those jets as their ONLY mode of travel, as per the insurance requirements of being the Chief Executive Office and Chairman of a Publicly Traded Company.".
That would make getting a cup of coffee from the local café a serious PITA. I guess that's why they have executive assistants?