Come to think of it, I don’t know why I’m still doing this job given the opprobrium I am constantly subjected to”.Perhaps unfortunately, not everyone can be Philip Green, and in any case making money out of private equity is not nearly as easy as it looks. There’s no reward for failure, as there often is in the publicly quoted sector, executives are frequently required to put their own money at risk, the private equity financiers rule their boards with a rod of iron, companies are generally run for cash with investors eschewing any high risk investment, and the whole sector remains a relatively small part of the business landscape.What’s more, you only ever get to hear about the successes. The failures are all too frequent too, and anyway, it is only a certain type of corporate asset that attracts the private equity buyer – companies with stable and predictable revenues, ideally backed by a strong property portfolio that can be remortgaged to pay down debt, or sold and leased back.None the less, it’s easy to see why so much of our top executive talent has had enough of publicly quoted companies. The rewards from private equity can be spectacular, and the best part of it is that nobody ever gets to know quite how big. Ever greater levels of disclosure and scrutiny have made many public companies particularly uncomfortable places to be. By contrast, the relative anonymity of private equity seems to have plenty to commend it.Other forces too seem to be driving the business world towards private equity. Poor returns from the stock market have encouraged institutional investors to seek better returns elsewhere, forcing an increasingly large proportion of assets into private equity.

It is one of the ironies of the process that rates of executive reward that would be regarded as anathema in the listed sector are tolerated as perfectly OK in private equity and even encouraged. As ever, the institutions speak with forked tongue, expressing suitable outrage for the disclosed excesses of quoted companies but shrugging it aside as the price of alchemy in private equity.There must of course be a limit to the capacity of private equity to cannibalise the listed sector. Not all companies are suitable for private equity, and in any case, many public companies are just too big for private ownership to be an appropriate form of capital. A £50bn company would sink a single owner if it went wrong, but in a publicly listed one, the risk is spread between thousands of different investors.The relationship between the two must of necessity be symbiotic, because all private equity ultimately needs the stock market for its exit strategy. Like it or not, most executive talent will have to reconcile itself to remaining in the gold fish bowl of the listed sector.As with celebrity, the shame of public exposure doesn’t in any case seem to interfere with the wheels of excess.

Kingfisher, which released its report and accounts yesterday, has long been a stunning example of it. Its former chief executive, Sir Geoff Mulcahy, was one of the first executives to enter the £1m a year club, and there he stayed, come rain or shine, until his enforced departure late last year.His payoff at “just” £500,000, might not seem so much given his more than 20 years of service, but it was mitigated by the fact that his very longevity entitles him to a pension worth 107 per cent of base salary, a promise that has forced the company to top up his pension pot by a further £2m to £15.2m. To the last, Sir Geoff has played his hand, and he’s left laughing all the way to the bank.A certain part of all us wants to say good luck to him. Just to remain upright on the ice as long as that is an achievement of sorts, and legally to pocket so much in the process seems almost admirable. Yet the process is plainly out of hand, witness the determination of Sir Geoff’s successor, Gerry Murphy, to follow Sir Geoff’s lead with a pay package of gigantum proportions – a whopping great golden hello plus the opportunity to triple his annual salary through the fulfilment of predictably vague performance targets.Kingfisher is a company that has produced a negative rate of return for its shareholders of almost a third over the last three years.