"Fritz Henderson is back at GM, for $3,000 an hour

By Alex Taylor III, senior editor   February 23, 2010: 11:58 AM ET

"NEW YORK (Fortune) -- After resigning as president and CEO of General Motors in December, Fritz Henderson might have gone into hiding or decided to sit out the harsh Michigan winter on a Florida beach.

Instead, here he is popping up again, this time as a consultant to GM on international operations at the very fancy fee of $59,090 a month for 20 hours of work a month. That works out to almost $3,000 an hour for a CEO who was ousted after just eight months on the job.

Is this one of those phony retired CEO arrangements, where the outgoing guy gets a fancy advisory deal to pass on his accumulated knowledge and wisdom to his successor? The phone may never ring, but the retiree gets to pocket a nice piece of change and an opportunity to pretend that he's still in the game.

According to GM insiders, the Henderson deal is on the up-and-up. Nobody can quarrel with his knowledge of GM's global business. While he was still on the regular payroll, he ran Latin America and the Middle East, Asia Pacific, and Europe........"