As the Eye has made clear, Coucher and the managing clique at Network Rail already knew that the game was up after the new transport secretary Philip Hammond warned him not to take his ludicrous £600,000 annual bonus this year.

Enron-ish creative accounting
As serious as the threat to his income, however, was the threat of open government. On the day Coucher resigned, Hammond was preparing to announce that he would end Gordon Brown’s pretence that the rail maintenance firm was a private company – a typically Enronish piece of creative accounting by Broon, designed to keep the firm’s £20bn debts off the public books – and extend the Freedom of Information Act to cover Network Rail.

Passenger groups and, in particular, the TSSA union for rail administrative workers are now lining up to find answers to questions they have been asking for years. They want to know how Coucher became a multimillionaire and a Scottish laird while running a state-owned firm.

£500,000 – the price of silence
Coucher and his business partner at Coucher Pender Ltd, Victoria Pender, NR’s head of government affairs, have never said how much they were paid as a success fee for setting up Network Rail at the behest of Brown’s henchwoman, Baroness Vadera, after the collapse of Railtrack. Coucher has also never explained why he worked as a freelance for five years before becoming full-time chief executive in August 2008.

The man who authorised his payments, Peter Bennett, head of human resources, has enjoyed extraordinary support from Coucher despite senior female employees accusing him of being a sexist, foul-mouthed bully in papers which were due to be put before an industrial tribunal by Vicky Lydford, a senior human resources manager. On the day she was due to appear, Network Rail paid her off with a £500,000 cheque on condition she stayed silent.

The secrecy surrounding her payoff was extraordinary, even in the suspicious world of Network Rail. Company managers tell the Eye that all records relating to her employment have vanished from the payroll computer. Her airbrushing from Network Rail’s history will doubtless surprise her husband, Kevin, who is still working at NR as a senior manager after 30 years in the rail industry. TSSA calculates that Bennett has signed more than 150 confidentiality agreements in all, at a cost to the taxpayer of more £15m, to buy the silence of staff after they resigned. Some of the cheques came from obscure subsidiary companies that the union’s research team did not even realise Network Rail possessed.

Five-times the bill for British Rail
When their Labour protectors went and Norman Baker, the Liberal Democrat MP whom Coucher had threatened to sue for libel if he raised allegations against the quango outside parliament, became coalition transport minister, paranoia descended on Network Rail’s King’s Cross headquarters. One woman manager, who resigned because she simply did not want to carry on working there, said news of her departure sparked consternation. She wasn’t entitled to a payoff, so they could not make her sign a gagging clause. What if she went to the press or to Hammond?

Coucher in his pomp received £1.2m a year, making him the highest-paid public sector manager in the land in 2008. His total published earnings to date are more than £6m. Because Network Rail was not a private company, normal shareholder scrutiny did not cover his remuneration.

Now he has gone, the Tories and Liberals will be tempted to follow the old ways of the British establishment and let the matter rest. But the taxpayers give £5bn a year to the “privatised” railways – five times as much in cash terms as the old nationalised British Rail received in the early 1990s; and £4bn goes to Network Rail. If Hammond wants value for money, he is going to have to examine the mess over which the Laird of Network Rail presided.

‘Ratbiter’