Think of a large round number and multiply it by 10. This, one must assume, was the legal advice offered to Andrea Orcel as he pondered how much to claim in compensation from Santander, the Spanish bank that withdrew its offer to him to become chief executive. Nothing else explains the size of the demand. A sum of €100m (£90m) is absurd.

The spurious logic, presumably, is that €100m is the jackpot Orcel thinks he could have secured over time at Santander. But such calculations lie deep in the world of speculation, since the bulk of his rewards would have relied on the performance of the share price and suchlike. Santander could equally argue it owes no more than the contractual expense of firing Orcel on day one.

The Spanish courts will decide the matter if the case gets that far. One suspects it won’t. The enormous claim looks more like a tactic to bully Santander into settling out of court.

The bank’s board, remember, dropped Orcel when it belatedly decided it couldn’t stomach the €50m it would cost to buy him out of his accumulated rewards at the Swiss bank UBS. So, to avoid the public humiliation of being forced by a court to pay anything at all, Santander has a strong incentive to reach an accommodation that can be smothered in confidentiality clauses.

Mind you, it would be fun to see the case go the distance. We might discover what on earth Santander was thinking when it offered Orcel the job in the first place. The Italian investment banker was a key adviser on the 2007 consortium takeover of Dutch bank ABN Amro. Royal Bank of Scotland, one of the bidders, promptly collapsed within a year. By rights, Orcel’s career should have been finished at that point.

Serco pays to avoid prosecution but that won’t make its problems go away

Deferred prosecution agreements (DPAs) have a terrible reputation. They’re a quick way for a board to write a cheque to make a problem go away, say the critics, and thus are a weak deterrent against bad corporate behaviour.

In the case of Serco, though, the easy line doesn’t quite work. Yes, it is simple for the company to pay £23m to avoid prosecution for fraud and false accounting; in financial terms, the agreement with the Serious Fraud Office is not even a flesh wound. And, yes, the same applies to the separate £70m settlement in 2013 with the Ministry of Justice after Serco billed for tagging offenders who were dead or in jail.

But the financial details don’t give the full picture. Serco’s board was cleared out after the electronic tagging scandal and the company had to prove to the Cabinet Office that it had reformed before it could be awarded more government work. Quite right, too, obviously. But those hard-to-measure reputational costs are reflected in a share price that is still two-thirds below 2013 levels.

There is a better reason to worry about DPAs. Do they deter the SFO from prosecuting individuals? In Serco’s case, the SFO says it is still investigating. That is the important part in this story.

Sainsbury’s share price nears 30-year low but chief executive’s pay is booming

Sainsbury’s is making “good progress in a challenging market”, says its chief executive, Mike Coupe. The same applies to his pay packet. It improved 7% to £3.9m last year even though Sainsbury’s share price is challenged, in the sense that it sits within pennies of its 30-year low.

Investors will vote on the remuneration report at Thursday’s annual meeting and will probably nod everything through without protest. They usually do at the supermarket chain. And, to be fair, Sainsbury’s underlying profits last year also rose 7%, which is better than the current direction of sales in the stores (down 1.6%).

All the same, Coupe – or rather, the entire board – have just squandered £46m in costs and fees in the doomed attempt to buy Asda. Other bosses would have volunteered for a bonus cut in the same circumstances.