Plenty of anger about the massive $398 million payout for Exxon Mobil Corp's former chairman Lee Raymond.

Exxon has defended the golden farewell as an appropriate reward for "a very long and distinguished career". Graef Crystal, Bloomberg's commentator on executive compensation and probably the best in the business, argues that Raymond might be a porker, but he's not as bad as some of his colleagues and in any case, the terms and conditions go back a long way. In other words, they weren't slapped on the table overnight. The implication: he's earned it.

But has he? True, when he orchestrated the merger between Exxon and Mobil in 1999, Raymond created the world's biggest oil company which has since, as The Economist points out, gone on to outperform its peers on almost every measure.

But corporate governance specialists argue that Raymond's payout was the result of soaring commodity prices, rather than any particularly brilliant strategy. And it's come at a time when soaring fuel prices have left consumers feeling less than prosperous. Raymond certainly hasn't been complaining about fuel prices.

That's why Centre for Corporate Policy director Charlie Cray hasn't wasted the opportunity of sticking the boots in. The lavish payout makes a mockery of the need to confront the obscene levels of executive pay pilloried by Warren Buffett. And as Cray points out, Exxon has a history of ''greenhouse gangsterism'' by bankrolling anti-environmentalist public policy front groups and putting a tiger in their think tanks.

Don't forget, Raymond has been a fierce attacker of the Kyoto protocol.

For the record, he remains vice-chairman of the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute.