Baltimore chief executive has mammoth task ahead

Baltimore's new chief executive, Mr Bijan Khezri, has not been slow to make himself known since he took over the reins a couple of weeks ago. And it's pretty safe to assume that Mr Khezri, a 32-year-old former investment banker of Persian and German stock, is not going to feature on former chief executive Fran Rooney's Christmas card list this year.

Within a week of taking over the top job at Baltimore with the aim of turning around the company before it runs out of cash, Mr Khezri did in-depth interviews with the Financial Times and the London Independent - not to mention The Irish Times - where he had some pungent comments on how the company was run under the ancien regime.

By all accounts, some of the comments have not gone down too well with Fran Rooney, who quit last July with an official line from the company that he left to pursue "fresh challenges".

The harsh fact was, however, that after a series of profit warnings and with the share price plummeting, the investment markets that had catapulted Baltimore to a FTSE 100 listing had lost confidence in the company.

But in his interview with the London Independent, Bijan Khezri had harsh things to say about the way Baltimore was run, apart altogether from his much-publicised comments about big salaries at the company.

His comments that Fran Rooney had an "uncompromising focus on the business" while former chairman Henry Beker was "a great visionary" are faint praise indeed.

What Bijan Khezri also said was that the company was "obsessed with its own importance" and that "we lost our focus on the battleground".

He also said that, when a case-by-case analysis was done on Baltimore's transactions, "there are very few where we actually made money".

He was quoted in the FT as describing Fran Rooney's £450,000 (€571,800) pay package last year as "outrageous". However, when he spoke to The Irish Times he seemed to draw back from that term and instead he substituted the word "unacceptable", a word he repeated a couple days later in his interview with the London Independent.

Whatever term one uses, and whether or not Baltimore directors were paid too much, if there is blame then blame for this lies with the non-executive directors who drew up the remuneration policies.

In the meantime, Mr Khezri has capped salaries - including his own at £150,000 a year, with non-executive directors having their pay cut by as much as 80 per cent.

His plan to pay the non-executives with share options - vigorously opposed by the Association of British Insurers - has apparently been dropped.

But what about the future for Baltimore? Has Mr Khezri - a former investment banker with Paribas and a non-executive director of a clutch of small technology businesses - the wherewithal to turn the company around?

Certainly, with the share trading at 21p, investors still remain to be convinced that Baltimore can be turned around before it runs out of cash.

If Bijan Khezri does manage to rescue Baltimore from what some months ago seemed like an inevitable takeover or, even worse, a wind-up when the cash runs out, it will certainly be a required case study in any MBA school.