So they quit, and the company goes bankrupt on a different timeline. Why should either society or shareholders accept new bonus declarations?
It's just buddies taking as much as possible before they lose control. And everybody knows this. It's weird to read these invented reasons of why they need extra compensation at this point.
But you know, we don't need to base our perception on their perception. We can look at the pattern and say: "they sure like to reward their buddies regardless of company performance."
But in bad times it seems to be fine to just forklift some cash into the execs' hands. Why not set targets for the company restructure and only pay the exec when those targets are met?
A rational exec (or employee) will look at the offered terms and compare them against their next best option (their “best alternative to a negotiated agreement”)
A rational shareholder/board will do the same. In many cases, if the board believes the shares are dramatically undervalued because of the current pandemic, they might prefer to rent executives for cash rather than renting them for shares which are in their mind undervalued at the moment.
The only reason I can see paying out in this case is if the exec was brought on to turn the company around and this was always a known, likely outcome despite anyone's best efforts. I'd also argue that in that scenario they should have negotiated more salary instead of stocks and bonuses.
A global pandemic is fairly unique situation to be the cause, but that's life. Why should executives get their compensation propped up when the line employees are getting laid off? It might make sense from a finance perspective, but it's complete garbage from a social equity perspective.
That's the ball they dropped. Yes, handing them a shiny new one out of a foundering company's budget is rather infuriating.
But fundamentally, you need to realize that if something is happening in a statistically significant way (like it is here with dozens of companies doing the same thing at the same time), there is likely an explanation in structural incentives.