HOW much is a job worth? The answer seems to depend on how much the employer is prepared to shell out.

For example the Waterfront Enterprise Board, we have learned, is prepared to pay its chief executive, Steven Izatt, around £270,000 per annum, although around £100,000 of that is down to bonuses, allowances, pension and ‘benefits’.

Actually salaries of over £200,000 are not unusual in the private sector. The 2008 annual report for the Jersey Electricity Company, for instance, shows that the chief executive was paid a basic salary of £200,447, plus bonuses and benefits in kind, plus pension. The post of director general of the Jersey Financial Services Commission now nets over £225,000 annually.

Given that WEB is also one of those hybrid organisations that is not part of the public sector, although wholly owned by the States of Jersey, I guess we might have expected Mr Izatt to receive similar remuneration. After all, if you give someone a high-profile responsibility you must expect to pay them accordingly.

In truth, the amount that people get paid for a job often seems largely arbitrary. For instance it could be argued that a nurse carries out work that is far more vital than many a paper pusher paid twice as much. The same goes for many so-called manual jobs which, if the work were to come to a halt, we would certainly pay more heed to very quickly.

Unfortunately for WEB, the work they have achieved to date has resulted in a half-baked pot-holed eyesore littering the south coast and which is constantly in the public eye, whichever direction you’re coming from.

Furthermore, the site is unlikely to attract its full quota of new shops and businesses until the current recession has well and truly turned the corner.

No one could have predicted the speed and depth of the economic downturn, but now it is here there are two choices. One is to live with the eyesore until things start to look up again and the other is to plunge ahead with the rest of the development, with the risk that it may turn into yet another white elephant to match its hilltop cousin, Fort Regent.

The problem that the States has to overcome is to make sure that public liability on the Waterfront project is kept to a bare minimum, is properly controlled, and that those who are getting the biggest bucks are made to sweat every penny.

In general terms, of course, the current public backlash against people earning high salaries has come out of the banking crisis. First the shareholders and, now that some banks are in public ownership, politicians, have been asking why people are still being paid bonuses when the organisation they were paid to oversee needs monumental support from the taxpayer.

The witch hunt started in earnest once the media found out that ‘Fred the Shred’ Goodwin, who used to run the Royal Bank of Scotland empire, had been promised an annual pension of £703,000. This week his family home was targeted by a new group of fanatics who have warned that their action is ‘just the beginning’.

Also this week the focus of attention turned to Lord Myners, a man employed by the UK government as financial services secretary to the Treasury, and who also stands accused of allowing Sir Fred to pocket such an outrageous pension.

Lord Myners is no stranger to Jersey and, in his private sector days, has invested his own money here. When he took up his position with the UK government he stood down from his various directorships, which included the Tate Modern and Marks & Spencer, as I recall. But that hasn’t stopped the UK media from putting the knife in by highlighting his offshore history, inaccurately in several cases.

Time was that people with shares in large banking groups would have read the annual report, shrugged their shoulders, and taken their dividend. But since the start of last year the global economic crisis has wiped out those shareholder returns, leaving investors quite hungry for revenge.

The upshot of all this is that these banks, which hitherto functioned pretty much as their senior decision makers wanted them to, are now on a much tighter leash. The politicians want to know where their money is going and they are starting to ask questions that have never been asked before, such as why do UK banks have operations in tax havens and are they paying all their taxes in the UK.

No doubt this sort of questioning is going to expose a good deal of the wheeling and dealing which has hitherto been considered ‘normal practice’ within the financial services industry, but which will come as a rude surprise to those outside of it.

The term mortgage-backed securities, for instance, will mean very little to most people, but back in 2006 at least one law firm in this Island was making quite a coup out of these ‘off balance sheet’ structures. One of those deals has attracted attention from UK regulators because it was a fundamental part of failed bank Northern Rock, which is also in public ownership.

At the time it came to light the national media were having trouble working out why the trust named a Down’s Syndrome charity in the UK as a beneficiary, even though the charity itself had never been told anything about it. No doubt they were given the same explanation that I was given: it was all perfectly above board, all the banks were doing it, these schemes were nothing unusual.

One question that might still be asked is why the highly paid financial services regulators allowed these deals to go through in the first place. The answer may be that many of them, like Lord Myners, are poachers turned gamekeepers who once worked in the private banking sector and therefore view complex financial offshore structures as absolutely normal.

No doubt, as the probing continues, there will be more questions about the salaries and pensions commanded by those who have been concentrating on getting one over on the competition, rather than making sure their balance sheets and bonuses are fit for the scrutiny of the public at large.