It's become de rigueur in Silicon Valley to let departing executives keep their needlessly plump bonus packages—no matter what the circumstances. First, Yahoo's incompetent COO took home $58 million just for getting fired. Now Google's former Chief Business Officer is getting to keep an $8 million bonus he was contractually obligated to give back.

According Business Insider, Nikesh Arora was given a $51 million compensation package in 2012, making him Google's highest paid executive. That package also came with a $8 million bonus. But Arora's bonus came with a clear stipulation: if he left the company for any reason before April 25, 2015, "Nikesh [would] be required to repay to Google the full value of the [bonus]."

Arora recently left Google to become an executive at SoftBank, a mobile carrier company. But instead of giving back his bonus as required, Arora will get to keep the money. According to Google's SEC filing:

On July 17, 2014, the Leadership Development and Compensation Committee of the Board of Directors of Google approved a waiver of the tenure-based repayment requirement in the cash award made by Google to Nikesh in April 2012.

Business Insider delightfully proclaims "It's good to be Nikesh Arora!" In reality, it's just good to be a warm body sitting in a C-level position.

[Photo: Getty]