Honda chief executive Takanobu Ito has suffered the shame of a summary 20 per cent salary reduction for three months. This punitive measure has also been applied to 12 other members of senior management at the company.
Although it exactly coincided with Honda’s studied failure to achieve a one-two clean sweep in the 2014 MotoGP championship, after Dani Pedrosa fell off twice in the same race at Sepang and gifted the series runner-up spot to Yamaha, Ito’s wallet-spanking was unassociated.
The real reason was an ignominious fifth recall of nearly half a million Honda Fit hybrid and petrol-engined subcompact cars for recurring electrical defects.