The dismissal of the two British Airways executives deemed responsible for the Terminal 5 fiasco raises more than simply the question of whether chief executive Willie "the buck stops with me" Walsh can survive.

The opening was a disaster, with more than 500 flights cancelled, 28,000 bags lost and the switch of dozens of long-haul flights from terminal 4 postponed for months.

Ahead of the sackings, Walsh said: "If people want to assign blame for this, it comes to me." He followed that up by saying there was "little value or merit in trying to apportion blame".

But four days after Walsh's comments the airline announced that Gareth Kirkwood, operations director, and David Noyes, customer services director, would "be leaving the company" and that this followed "the airline's move to Terminal 5". BA refused to admit they had been sacked - saying simply that they would be paid off "in line with their contracts".

The problem is that we, the public who own BA through our pension funds and savings, don't know what those contracts were. We will never know how much Kirkwood and Noyes received to go.

In fact, we know remarkably little about two men who played such pivotal roles at the company. Their biographies on the BA website didn't even show their ages. Yet both men had been with the company for more than 20 years, and both sat on the 10-strong executive management board.

Kirkwood was last summer named as one of the "BA 10" - the 10 staffers, including sacked commercial director Martin George, facing possible extradition to the US over price-fixing charges.

Noyes was appointed customer services director a little over three years ago, when his predecessor Mervyn Walker was forced to walk the plank after the summer 2004 chaos caused by staffing shortages. Previously he was in overall charge of Heathrow.

These were people of some consequence. Their departure was prompted after BA chairman Sir Martin Broughton met major shareholder Standard Life. Some shareholders are more equal than others.

We ordinary shareholders know BA has said the debacle will cost at least £16 million. But we can't tell how key Kirkwood and Noyes were if we do n't know their pay and thus pay-offs.

Under Stock Exchange listing rules, companies must disclose share-option awards to "persons discharging managerial responsibility." That gives a fair idea of who matters just below board level.

For good governance, boards should obviously have a majority of non-executive directors. There is nothing wrong, either, with adopting a two-tier system: a board of directors and an executive management board. But a growing number of firms (WPP, BSkyB, BA) have just two or three main-board executives. Their salaries and bonuses are fully disclosed. Those of managers immediately below them are not. It is time for investors to demand the pay, perks and pensions of those who actually run the business are public. And whoever ends up as BA's chief operating officer(two roles are being replaced by one) should be on the board so everyone can see where the buck really stops. And how many bucks he or she picks up.

We're just too gloomy to spend

It is true people seeking new loans either as first-time buyers or as they come off a fixed rate set for, say, two years are finding it much harder and more expensive to get a mortgage.

The Chancellor has berated banks and building societies for not passing the Bank of England's most recent rate cuts to customers. Now the Bank has launched an ambitious plan to ease liquidity in the system.

But the Bank's own figures show 52% of outstanding mortgage debt in 2007 was on variable rates, which have been cut fairly promptly in line with Bank Rate. Vicky Redwood, UK economist at Capital Economics, calculates that someone with the average mortgage of £100,000 is £45 a month better off following the three cuts since December.

The problem is, that with all the talk of doom and gloom they are not spending that extra cash, and consumer spending is slowing down further than it really needs to.

Look east for cricket's future

Surrey County Cricket Club made pre-tax profits of £721,000 last year - the highest ever in the club's illustrious 163-year history. Mahendra Singh Dhoni is being paid $1.5 million a year to captain the Chennai Super Kings in the Indian Premier League which started last weekend.

So the wicket-keeper/batsman will make slightly more in the 44 days of the tournament (£754,000) than Surrey made in the whole of a year. The reason in both cases is Twenty20, a shortened version of the real game invented many years ago by English village cricket sides.

Surrey's gate receipts rose 67% to £5.8 million in 2007, and the club makes clear that "this can be attributed to the two West Indies International Twenty20 matches that were hosted in addition to the regular Test and One-day International match schedule".

MS Dhoni is the highest-paid player at the IPL but by no means unique in collecting a dollar sum in seven figures. Despite a disappointing dearth of coverage of the new competition in the British media, there can be no doubt that the whole thing will be a massive success.

The IPL had raised $1.8 billion (£900 million) before the first ball was bowled. That came from TV rights, sponsorship and the auction of the team franchises, which attracted business people as diverse as Lachlan Murdoch and Vijay Mallya of United Breweries.

Few of the teams seriously expect to turn a profit this year, but the IPL is no fly-by-night tournament. It runs for the next 10 years, and in that time a lot of people will make a lot of money.

So far the English Cricket Board has acted like the proverbial ostrich. But it should start to listen to the chief executives of the county teams.

Surrey's Paul Sheldon and Hampshire's Rod Bransgrove know full well that the future of the game, in financial terms at least, lies in Twenty20. After all, Hampshire's captain Dimitri Mascarhenas is the sole English representative in this year's IPL. He won't be alone next year.