Will highly paid investors curb pay of highly paid bosses?

Vince Cable launches an empty vessel

To curb the excesses of executive pay, Vince Cable has passed the buck back to shareholders.

Investors will be given the power to formally veto companies' future pay policies - although, as is the case now, if shareholders dislike how businesses have implemented the agreed policy, their votes will not be binding ...

For about 10 years shareholders have had much more influence on pay in the boardroom.

This has coincided with a quadrupling in top executives' pay, whereas company share prices as measured by the FTSE100 index have gone nowhere and average earnings for the rest of us have increased just a few percentage points a year.

So will giving shareholders increased authority over executive pay serve as a brake on bosses remuneration ...

Arguably, the top fund managers - those who vote the shares we hold in our pensions or assorted long-term savings schemes - are disincentivised to be too aggressive in limiting corporate pay rises, because they are on the same gravy train.

That is why Mr Cable also wants more "diversity" in the board room - more "lawyers, public servants and academics" ... to introduce the views of the wider world into discussions about how and how much an executive should be rewarded.

You tell me if "lawyers, public servants and academics" represent a revolution in the variety of views likely to be represented in the boardroom ...

BBC NEWS  23 Jan 2012    Corporate State Log    'Do less, make it seem like more'

Fitting brakes to the pay merry-go-round

Former BP boss earns £12m from Iraqi oil venture

Hayward who left his old employers with a £10m pension pot after the Gulf of Mexico blowout, exercised his rights to a 6.67% stake in the Genel Energy business along with his partners Nat Rothschild and two other executives.

The four Genel backers are entitled to a windfall nudging £160m as they swap their "founder" shares in the Vallares investment vehicle they established in return for ordinary shares in Genel.

Hayward and the other founders of Vallares will not be able to sell their shares until 21 November under a lock-in arrangement ...

Gdn  20 Jan 2012    Corporate Sociopathy

Deepwater Horizon    Peak Oil

Tony Hayward

Executive pay and bonuses

Goldman Sachs faces backlash over $12.6bn staff pay pot

Goldman Sachs’ staff are in line to collect $12.6bn (£8.2bn) in pay and bonuses this year despite a fall in profits ...

Goldman is axing 1,000 jobs and cutting $1.2bn in costs by the middle of the year in an attempt to shield profits ...

One bright spot for Goldman in the quarter ... will be an increase in fees from debt and equity underwriting for clients.

And despite a tough year, Goldman topped the mergers and acquisitions league table in the UK, advising on deals worth $117.6bn .

The results will surely lead to Lloyd Blankfein ... being pressed to offer his thoughts on how Goldman will be affected by the new “Volcker Rule” ... (which) ... bans banks from gambling with their own money and limits the amount of capital they can invest in hedge funds and private equity investments ...

Tel  18 Jan 2012    Bankocracy Log    'Doing God's Work'

Tesco executive sold shares before profit warning

A senior Tesco executive sold more than £200,000 of shares in the supermarket a week before its first profit warning in 20 years wiped nearly £5bn off its market value.

Noel "Bob" Robbins, the grocer's chief UK operating officer, offloaded 50,000 shares at 404.5p each on 4 January and pocketed £202,255.

By selling them 10 days ago, he made nearly £44,000 more than he would have done had he sold them yesterday ...

Tesco said Mr Robbins, a long-serving employee, had done nothing wrong ...

Another director, Ken Towle ... sold 40,193 Tesco shares at 385.6p on 22 December, earning about £155,000.

However, the firm said these shares represented less than 5 per cent of Mr Towle's holding and were sold for personal reasons ...

Ind  14 Jan 2012    Corporate Sociopathy

Tescopoly

Five key questions for Barclays' Diamond

1. Over the last decade, the Barclays share price has fallen by 68 per cent, from 570p to 196p. Over the same time period, how much money (in cash and shares) have you taken out of Barclays?

2. Pay per employee is around £250,000 at Barclays Capital. But even the average compensation within BarCap will hide a great disparity, with management in Barclays Capital receiving far higher rewards than £250,000. Even so, this is at least three times higher than at the retail bank. If talent and rewards go hand in hand, why are you so against transparent disclosure of what top earners do for these very high rewards at Barclays Capital?

3. At the start of 2011, Bob, you said: "It's not OK for taxpayers to bail out banks." When do you think it is right for central banks to intervene and when is it not ok?

4. According to the European Banking Authority, Barclays has stockpiled £3.3bn of deferred tax assets from losses, which seems a large number considering that Barclays never reported a loss over the financial crisis. No doubt this is legal, but how does Barclays square paying minimal tax and "good citizenship"?

5. It is not entirely clear what Barclays management is lobbying for in private, and whether this is in the best interests of your owners, the shareholders. To help me understand your efforts in lobbying, both in the UK, Europe and US, perhaps you could make available recordings of all management meetings with politicians and lobbyists? ...

Ind  13 Jan 2012    Bankocracy log    

Shareholder interest is a thing of the past

Bob Diamond: No apologies. No restraint. No shame.

RBS and Barclays needed Fed lifeline

Barclays shareholders fear dilution of influence

Qatar invests more than £2bn in Barclays

Barclays to Tap Sovereign Wealth Funds

Barclays

RBS axes 3,500 jobs at investment arm

The move at Global Banking and Markets (GBM), which has employees in Stoke, Manchester, Edinburgh and London, follows Government pressure for the 83% state-owned bank to pull back from its ambitions to be a global investment player ...

The job losses come amid reports that John Hourican, the head of GBM who will continue to oversee the restructuring of the business, is in line to pick up £4 million in long-term incentive shares that he was awarded in 2009.

The latest round of job cuts come on top of 2,000 losses announced by the bank last summer.

The new losses will mean nearly 11,000 posts have been cut at GBM from the pre-banking crisis headcount of 24,000 ...

Ind  12 Jan 2012    Bankocracy Log    Bonus Culture    Economic Democracy

RBS chief in line to pick up more bonus millions

Tony Blair and the £8million tax 'mystery'

Official accounts show a company set up by Mr Blair to manage his business affairs paid just £315,000 in tax last year on an income of more than £12 million ...

Tel  07 Jan 2012    Tony Blair

Blair Inc: How Tony Blair makes his fortune

Responsible Capitalism: Even the MoS is 'on message'.

David Cameron to anger City with plans to make shareholder remuneration votes mandatory

... the The Telegraph can reveal that Stephen Hester, the chief executive of the largely publicly owned Royal Bank of Scotland, is in line for a multi-million pound bonus this year.

Although a final decision has not been made, senior figures close to the situation have revealed that the board believe that Mr Hester deserves to be paid "the market rate" for his job.

Senior figures said that at present Mr Hester was being paid "very much in the bottom quartile" whereas the difficulty of the job re-organising the bank was "very much in the top quartile".

Last year, Mr Hester's package totalled £7.89m, comprising his £1.22m salary, a £2.04m annual share-based performance bonus, a £4.2m grant of stock under a long-term incentive plan, a £420,000 cash contribution to his personal pension scheme, and £8,000 in other benefits ...

Tel  07 Jan 2011

Greedy bankers to face prison ...

David Cameron: my vision for a fair Britain

In the interview, Mr Cameron outlined ...

A major reform of executive pay that would rein in what he called “crony capitalism”, where underperforming executives were seen to “fill their boots”.

Shareholders would have to approve salary packages and, crucially, pay-offs, instead of simply having advisory votes as at present ...

The measures on executive pay, which will be the subject of a consultation to be announced shortly by Vince Cable, the Business Secretary, represent the most significant moves yet on the issue.

They come as a new analysis from the IPPR think tank shows that chief executives in 87 of the FTSE 100 companies took home £5.1?million in basic pay, bonuses, share incentives and pension contributions in 2010-11.

However, there was not a corresponding rise in the value of their companies ...

Tel  07 Jan 2011

Labour urges 'responsible capitalism' in executive pay

Shadow business secretary Chuka Umunna said on Saturday that increasing transparency was the key to ensuring executives were not perversely rewarded for poor performance ...

Umunna called for simplified pay packages and the creation of a league table showing how much more chief executives earn than their staff.

He told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that excessive executive pay was "systematic" of the "kind of capitalism that has grown up in the country over the last 30 years" ...

The Labour MP said that while there was not a "magic pill" to solve the problem a variety of measures, including increased transparency, simplified remuneration packages and the publication of pay ratios, would help create a better pay culture ...

Gdn  07 Jan 2012    Divi Dave Log    Do less ...    Ed Miliband    George Osborne

David Cameron to anger City ...

Bankers ready to sue if bonuses too small

British banks should brace themselves for claims from "disgruntled" bankers who will not roll over and accept lower bonuses than usual despite the huge public and shareholder backlash against out-of-control pay ...

City lawyers said an increasing number of bankers were building cases in preparation of lower bonus payouts and were prepared to fight it out at court ...

Richard Fox, employment partner at law firm Kingsley Napley, said ... Bankers who did not "trust" the reward they received could work out what they thought they should have got based on a calculation of the bank's profits and their share in the type of bonus pool available ...

Tel  02 Jan 2012    Bankocracy Log    Bonus Culture    "I'll do as I like"

Revealed: how City fees are eating into our pensions

'Christian values' or markets, Mr Cameron: which is to be?

A source who has seen the presentation told the Observer that the conclusion was fund managers had "lost sight" of their customers and that the government needed to act.

The presentation suggested that the country's pensions black hole – unfunded public and private pension commitments – could be wiped out over time if costs could be reduced, a source said.

"They are so high that the industry is actually destroying value for the UK investor at least as fast as the stock market can create it," the source said.

"The government's message is that you have to save for your retirement, but with the amount you will make it hardly makes it worthwhile if these costs are being taken out. And the highest cost of all are personnel costs, wages and bonuses." ...

The experts behind the advice ... revealed that the £2.1 trillion assets under management in the UK attract a cost of £67.2bn a year – or the equivalent of 3.2% – with the greatest cost being wages and bonuses for traders and fund managers ...

Gdn  17 Dec 2011    Contesting the Markets Log    Corporate Sociopathy Log

'Wall Street'

Tax avoidance trade puts Square Mile in spotlight again

Are banks heeding King's bonus call?

By the end of September 2011, the big three banks had amassed a bill of around £9bn to pay their investment banking staff.

Using figures provided by Barclays, HSBC and bailed-out Royal Bank of Scotland, it can be estimated that the three were expecting to pay £3.9bn, £3.1bn and £2bn respectively on employment costs for the first nine months of the year ...

How does the £9bn total compare with the same time a year ago? Then the number was a little over £10.5bn so it represents a fall of around 15% ...

The Bank's Financial Policy Committee – the body set up to look for systemic risk – is also preparing to look at the way the performance of top bankers is measured.

One influential FPC member – Andy Haldane – has already produced figures showing that bankers' pay at the seven biggest US banks would have risen from $2.8m to $3.4m on average between 1989 and 2007 if it had been based on return on assets (risks) rather than return on equity (shareholders), which had sparked a tenfold rise to $26m on average by 2007 ...

Gdn  05 Dec 2011

Welcome to the living dead economy

Hayek would say that the zombie-like state of affairs has been due to the refusal to allow banks that lent irresponsibly to go bust ...

Gdn  04 Dec 2011    Bankocracy Log    Bonus Culture    What caused the credit crunch?

Shareholder interest is a thing of the past

A Variety of Looters

Switching on any channel carrying ads is to be bombarded by the 'have it all, have it now' consumer culture, which depends on credit for its existence.

As viewers we have been routinely encouraged to feel that owning the latest 'whatever' is vital to the enhancement of status and self-image.

The notion that the marginalised should be strong enough - stoical enough - to accept their failure to participate, is a counsel of perfection addressed to those least able to manage it.

The possibility that full - and fulfilling - employment might be the royal road out of this dystopia is unmentioned by the the Riots Communities and Victims Panel, as is the strong possibility that vastly unequal 'societies' vastly increase the difficulty of finding detachment.

City workers still banking on bonuses despite gloom

Based on average salaries of £83,000, a payout of 24 per cent would translate into a bonus of £19,920.

A managing director would receive a bonus of £166,000 if their expectations are realised based on an average salary of £237,000.

City workers have enjoyed rises of around 12 per cent to their basic pay, according to Astbury Marsden, at a time when most other workers are dealing with either below-inflation rises or pay freezes as the economy stumbles.

The higher expectations of those at managing-director level come because the more senior a banker is, the greater the proportion of pay linked to performance when compared with more junior staff.

At director level within investment banks the expectation on average is for a bonus worth 42 per cent of basic pay ...

Ind  28 Nov 2011

Consumerism and police failures to blame for scale of summer UK and London riots

The hypocrisy involved in blaming 'consumerism' is breathtaking, since it is the key source of corporate-created discontent.

A desire to “have what we want when we want” and "expecting something for nothing" drove the looters on to the streets in August, a review set up by the Government said.

It claimed consumerism and peer status through owning top brands had become a “new religion”.

Looters were able to raid thousands of shops and businesses because a failure by police to tackle the first disturbances encouraged others to go on the rampage.

The public felt “abandoned” by the police while a lack of action and apparent inability to contain the disturbances meant others were willing to “test reactions” elsewhere, the Riots Communities and Victims Panel found ...

“In the Panel’s conversations with communities and young people, the desire to own goods which give the owner high status (such as branded trainers and digital gadgets) was seen as an important factor behind the riots.

“In addition, the idea of ‘saving up’ for something has been replaced by the idea that we should have what we want when we want.” ...

Tel  28 Nov 2011    Blog    Economic Democracy    Inequality    Riots    Third Meltdown Log

A Very Neoliberal Catastrophe    Family Breakdown    Neoliberal Consumer Culture

5 Days in August

Victorian Contrasts

Meal appeal targets 1m donations over Christmas

The One Million Meal Appeal, which will be launched on 26 November, gives customers the opportunity to add an extra store cupboard item ... which will then be delivered to local community projects by food poverty charity FareShare ...

The initiative was welcomed by minister for civil society, Nick Hurd, who said:

"Sainsbury's progressive initiative with FareShare will encourage consumers up and down the country to get involved in their local community and support the vulnerable and needy – it is a great example of the principles of Every Business Commits, this coalition government's strong belief that every business can play a positive role in society." ...

Gdn  24 Nov 2011

50p tax band will cost Britain £1bn a year

The tax is pushing Britain’s wealth creators beyond a “psychological threshold”, the Centre for Economics and Business Research warned ...

The CEBR said that up to 270,000 people who pay the top rate will find ways to reduce their liability by using tax-free savings products and investing in venture-capital trusts or enterprise-investment plans.

Others will invest in offshore bonds or leave the country altogether ...

Tel  23 Nov 2011
A 'modern and compassionate party'    Inequality    Whither Britain? Log

Communitarian Citizenship    Marginalised by Standortkonkurrenz    Unsustainable Burdens

Trussell Trust

Why has executive pay increased so drastically?

The 'trickle down' theory gets unscrutinised support ...

The High Pay Commission today reports on the 30 year trend of increasing top pay that has left the earnings gap between the very richest and the rest of society wider than at any point since Queen Victoria was on the throne.

The report identifies the early 1980s as the turning point when the pay gap started to grown rapidly ...

In the last year alone executive pay in FTSE 100 companies grew by 49%.

The report cites the example of Barclays, where top pay is now 75 times that of the average worker. In 1979 it was 14.5.

Over that period, the lead executive's pay in Barclays has risen by 4,899.4% – from £87,323 to a £4,365,636.

It was argued that to achieve the necessary dynamism those at the top of companies must be incentivised, and their interests must be tied to those of the shareholders ...

That wealth would then trickle down to the rest of society ...

Gdn  22 Nov 2011    Corporate Sociopathy    Inequality    John Redwood

Workers 'should be given powers' to help curb pay of top executives

Executive pay consultants behind escalating boardroom salaries

Recent trends are illuminating: in 1978, the head of British Aerospace was paid £29,000.

By 2010, the head of its successor company, BAe Systems, collected a package worth nearly £2.4m, a rise of 8,000%.

That compares with an increase of 556% in median male income over the same period.

But why has boardroom pay skyrocketed in recent years?

Critics point their fingers at the pay consultants appointed by remuneration committees at top companies, describing their relationship as being akin to a cartel.

Twenty years ago such firms did not exist and pay negotiations were thrashed out between the executive and the board with some help from lawyers.

There are now half a dozen specialist pay consultancies in the City whose sole job is to advise remuneration committees how much executives should be paid and how to structure their pay packages.

The consultants' fees are kept private but are in line with those charged by accountants and lawyers ...

A recent survey by Income Data Services found senior directors at FTSE-100 companies last year enjoyed a 49% pay rise, earning on average £2.7m – 113 times the national average of £24,000 for a worker in the private sector, where salaries have risen 3% in the last year.

The average chief executive saw their total payout jump by 43% to £3.9m.

And all this at a time when business groups are lobbying for the scrapping of the 50% higher marginal tax rate ...

Gdn  18 Nov 2011    Corporate Sociopathy    Global Risks 2012    Inequality
Is Capitalism the only game in town?    Third Meltdown Log

The two faces of Tony Blair

In the centre of Kazakhstan's new capital, Astana ... a glass pyramid stands on a hill overlooking the Presidential Palace.

Designed by the British architect Norman Foster, the £36m "Palace of Peace and Reconciliation" is the brainchild of Kazakhstan's autocrat president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, who commissioned a building where religious leaders from around the world could meet and find common ground.

The irony of the building's construction was not lost on local human rights activists who have documented an increasingly hostile attitude towards religious groups in Kazakhstan – and raised serious questions about the recruitment by Mr Nazarbayev of Tony Blair as an adviser to the nation.

For Mr Blair ... the timing of the law is embarrassing and piles on the pressure to explain the exact nature of his business dealings with the regime.

The Kazakh government has admitted that Mr Blair – through his business Tony Blair Associates – has set up an office in Astana.

His former spin doctor, Alastair Campbell, and former chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, have also been hired for consultancy work ...

Ind  31 Oct 2011    Tony Blair

Is narcissism the new capitalism?

What is it about high corporate pay that so enrages us?

We discovered last week, through an Incomes Data Services survey, that FTSE 100 chiefs earned an average of £3.8m last year.

Some of the highest paid, such as Sir Martin Sorrell of the advertising giant WPP, received £4.2m, while Xstrata's Mick Davis took home £18m.

Both have been highly successful ... But are they worth a 40 per cent – after stripping out inflation – increase year on year? ...

Executives defend themselves by claiming that they operate in a competitive, international free market for talent.

That's patently not true. It's a distorted market fed by this closed shop. It's become too easy for directors to make fortunes because of these incentives, which are the corporate equivalent of MPs' expenses and bankers' bonuses ...

All this is giving rise to a rather uncomfortable narcissism which is infecting the corporate world and giving capitalism a bad name.

That's why it was disappointing that Sir Martin sounded so petulant when he was interviewed on the radio last week to comment on his bumper package.

It was a great chance for him to explain to the public, and to show that he really was "worth it".

Instead, he came across as pompous by claiming his base £1m salary was "very low" – not the sort of remark to make when for most people real incomes are declining ...

Ind  30 Oct 2011    Bonus Culture    Is capitalism the only game in town?    Pawns or Players?

Gordon Gekko    Inequality    'No such thing as society'

Cover-up at St Paul's

FTSE 100 directors' earnings rose by almost half last year

A question for the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Bishop of London and the Dean of St Paul's:

Whose side are you on, Gordon Gekko or Giles Fraser?

Total earnings for directors of FTSE 100 companies increased by 49% last year, far outpacing pay claims for workers outside the boardroom.

A FTSE 100 executive typically received an average of £2.7m in 2010, according to the research by Incomes Data Services, which analysed payouts of salaries, bonuses and long-term incentive plans the last financial year.

For chief executives, the average total pay deal was £3.8m – an average rise of 43.5% – while IDS calculated that finance directors received an average increase of 34.1%,to take their average to £2m, while all other directors received an average increase of 66.5%, to take their average to £2.2m.

The directors enjoyed such large increases in the total take-home pay as bonus schemes compensated for the average 3.2% rise in base salaries that they were awarded last year. Inflation is running at 5.2% while data from IDS shows that pay deals in the private sector are running at 2.6% ...

Gdn  28 Oct 2011    Corporate Sociopathy    
Growing Inequality    In the absence of economic democracy    Third Meltdown

Top Earners Doubled Share of Nation’s Income, Study Finds

In praise of … Giles Fraser

Head of Lloyds Bank's retail arm gets shares worth £2.3m

It's not just the systemic greed; it's not just the fact that Lloyds is supposed to be nationalised: what should worry us most is that no other sector of the economy can match 'rewards' of this nature, which both distorts career choices, and with it, the prospect of rebalancing the economy away from fiat currency banking.

Bailed out Lloyds Banking Group has handed the new head of its high street banking arm, Alison Brittain, more than 7.6m shares – worth £2.3m – to buy her out of performance related deals at Spanish bank Santander ...

A stock exchange announcement by Lloyds shows the cost of recruiting her from the Spanish bank, from which the new Lloyds chief executive António Horta-Osório, has recruited many members of his top team.

The 7.6m of shares are awarded in three tranches.

The first 1.2m are hers regardless of performance provided she stays until January 2014.

She will get a further 612,153 if certain performance criteria – which Lloyds did not disclose – are achieved by June 2013 while the largest portion, some 5.9m, will vest in December 2012 provided performance criteria are achieved.

It is costing Lloyds up to £4.6m to buy Horta-Osório out of his previous deals at Santander after he was handed 6m shares – which payout over three years – and £516,000 in cash.

Other executives he brought with him from Santander have cost £2.3m to buy out of previous pay deals ...

Gdn  27 Sept 2011    A free market train wreck    Bankocracy Log    Corporate Sociopathy Log

House prices in prime locations breached £1m

Over the past three years since the collapse of Lehman Brothers triggered the financial crisis the average asking price has risen by 2.5%, compared to a 16.4% increase in the previous three years.

Demand is strongest at the high-end of the market, with almost 20,000 £1m homes on the market in the three months to the end of June.

While more than half of the 19,746 £1m -plus homes on estate agents' books were in London, the capital only ranked 41st in terms of density of £1m properties.

Beaconsfield ... tops the table with 47% of properties valued at more than £1m against 13% in the capital.

Next on the list is Virginia Water, Surrey (44%); Much Hadham, Hertfordshire, (38%); Radlett, Herfordshire (37%) and Chelsea footballers' and their wives favourite Cobham, Surrey (33%) ...

London retains the highest average asking price at £427,889, up 2.4% in the last month and 7.2% over the past year.

The cheapest region is the north of England, with an average asking price of £145,430 – a 2.6% fall over the past month and 4.2% down on last year.

Gdn  19 Sept 2011    A free market train wreck    Inequality    Ponzi Housing Market

Tony Blair and Col Gaddafi's secret meetings

The letters and emails, found by The Sunday Telegraph, show Mr Blair held secret talks with Gaddafi in the months before Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was freed from a British jail.

He was flown to Libya twice at Gaddafi's expense on one of the former dictator's private jets - visiting the him in June 2008 and April 2009, when Libya was threatening to cut all business links if Megrahi stayed in a British jail ...

The emails and letters – between Mr Blair's office, the British ambassador in Tripoli and the Libyan ambassador in London – raise concern over possible conflicts of interest regarding his varied roles as Middle East peace envoy, philanthropist and business consultant.

The documents will also add fuel to suggestions made last year by Gaddafi’s son, Saif, that Mr Blair had advisory links to the Libyan government and the Libyan Investment Authority ...

Tel  17 Sept 2011    Tony Blair    

Bosses' bonuses up by 187% since 2002

Average bonuses for directors of FTSE 350 companies have risen by 187% since 2002, without a corresponding rise in share prices, new research suggests.

The High Pay Commission said on Monday that average annual bonuses were worth 48% of salary in 2002, but are now 90%.

Commission chairman Deborah Hargreaves said it was a "myth" that big bonuses meant companies performed better ...

During the time bosses' salaries rose by 63%, said the report, which is due to publish its full findings in November ...

The study also found that total pay packages for company executives in the wider FTSE 350 had gone up by 700% since 2002 ...

Pay levels for the average worker in Britain have risen by 27% over the past decade ...

BBC NEWS  05 Sept 2011    Bonus Culture    Corporate Sociopathy    Inequality

Rupert Murdoch receives $12.5m bonus

The News Corporation chairman and chief executive, Rupert Murdoch, received a $12.5m (£7.7m) cash bonus for the last financial year, while his total remuneration rose 47% year on year to $33m, according to the company's annual statement to shareholders.

His son James Murdoch – who is deputy chief operating officer, with responsibility for News Corporation's business in Europe and Asia – also benefited handsomely, with a $6m cash bonus taking his total remuneration to almost $18m – a 74% rise on his 2010 take-home pay.

Chase Carey, News Corp's chief operating officer and Murdoch's right-hand man, took home $30m in the year to 30 June, including a $10m bonus.

Roger Ailes, who runs Fox News, received a slight increase in total compensation in 2011, up to $15.5m from $13.9m in 2010. Ailes received a $1.5m cash bonus.

Gdn  02 Sept 2011    Corporate Sociopathy Log    'Titillation and Diversion'

Britain's Society Broken by Greed

Great Britain, a country where the gap between rich and poor is wider than almost anywhere else in the Western world, can still be a miserably tough place to live, especially for the children of the poor.

According to a UNICEF study, the UK is ranked as the most child-unfriendly of 21 major industrialized nations.

There are 3.4 million children living below the poverty line in Britain, a seriously distressing number.

And for anyone who has the misfortune of growing up in a bad neighborhood, beatings and assaults are merely part of everyday life.

Some 60 percent of children between the ages of 10 and 15 become a victim of crime at least once ...

Der Spiegel  16 Aug 2011    Economic Democracy

Another way to reward the fat-cat directors

The headline figures are that the average FTSE 100 director is in line for a pension worth £175,000, 29 times more than the rest of the workforce.

And while two-thirds of guaranteed final salary pension schemes have been closed to the rank and file, 97 per cent of FTSE 350 companies have kept such plans for their directors.

A case of do as we say, not do as we do ...

One further thought: company directors are enjoying a disproportionate share of the enormous taxpayer subsidy for private pension provision.

Since they get so much more in both pay and pension benefits than their staff, the cost of giving them pensions tax relief is also so much higher ...

Ind  09 Aug 2011    Corporate Sociopathy    Inequality    

RBS poised to hire more investment bankers

The terms being offered to bankers by RBS have been lucrative and The Sunday Telegraph understands that some have been offered base salaries of as much as £999,999.

This figure is significant because the bank only has to publish the number of staff earning £1m or more.

Tel  06 Aug 2011    Bankocracy Log    Corporate Sociopathy Log

RBS to axe 2,000 jobs after tumbling £794m into the red

Royal Bank of Scotland posts £794m loss after Greece hit

Reaping Millions in Nonprofit Care for Disabled

Outsourcing: A warning from New York

Medicaid money created quite a nice life for the Levy brothers from Flatbush, Brooklyn.

The brothers, Philip and Joel, earned close to $1 million a year each as the two top executives running a Medicaid-financed nonprofit organization serving the developmentally disabled.

They each had luxury cars paid for with public money. And when their children went to college, they could pass on the tuition bills to their nonprofit group ...

The state spends, by far, more than any other caring for this population: $10 billion this year, and roughly 20 cents of every dollar spent nationally.

More than half of that money goes to private providers like the Levys, with little oversight of their spending.

And the providers have become so big and powerful that they shape much about how the system operates, from what kinds of care are emphasized to how much they will be paid for it.

“They’re bigger than government in some ways,” said Thomas A. Maul, former commissioner of the state’s Office of Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities. “That isn’t what our system was supposed to be.”

NYT  02 Aug 2011    Outsourcing

So you thought Britain wasn't corrupt?

... you will find ways in which Britain falls very far short of Scandinavian-level probity; areas where complacency has meant a blind eye is turned to abuses, and grey zones where transactions take place that are not actually illegal, but which would – and should – embarrass one or both parties if they became public.

Several such instances emerged earlier this week when the Commons Home Affairs Committee questioned the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police ...

The most blatant was Sir Paul's acceptance of hospitality from Champney's health farm.

... the value of this gift – around half the average Briton's annual pre-tax salary – and Sir Paul's apparent inability to understand that accepting it sat uneasily with his position as the country's most senior police officer on a salary of more than £250,000, suggests a blind spot.

It left the impression that there was one law, and one set of subsidised living standards, for the well connected, and another for everyone else.

Something similar applied when it came to the hiring of Neil Wallis, former deputy editor of the News of the World, as a media consultant.

Despite some close questioning … there was precious little clarity about how Wallis actually got the job.

Between the lines, however, it could be deduced that there was no open advertisement, no standard recruitment procedure, no formal interview and no public disclosure of the appointment. This was a public-sector, tax-payer funded position, yet contacts and networks appear to have been all.

What we have here are two of the most deep-rooted maladies of British society: freebies among friends and jobs for the boys ...

... these ingrained ways of doing things are part of the reason why the UK comes below Finland, Australia and Canada in TI's corruption perception index.

They are also a reason, along with our segregated schools, why social mobility in Britain is so relatively poor. Advantage compounds advantage.

Ind  22 July 2011    Inequality    Sociopathy    

City watchdog reveals inquiry into collapse of HBOS

BSkyB deal delay to cost City advisers millions

The bankers are estimated to be heading for a total payout of £85m, with the lawyers securing just under £70m, according to data drawn up by Thomson Reuters/Freeman.

Yet the lion's share of fees in merger and acquisitions are dependent on whether the deal is completed.

"Advisers are paid a base fee but that is only a few thousand pounds," the banker said. "The real payment comes on completion."

There could be even more at stake, he added, depending on how the advisers were incentivised.

He said the industry average for fees was set at about 4 per cent of the estimated value of the target at the close.

If News Corp is forced to bid 850p per share, valuing the whole group close to £9bn as estimated by analysts, the fees could go as high as £360m ...

It emerged this week that investment banking fees are booming once again. The total sum paid for advisory work – which includes raising money as well as takeovers – in the first half hit $48.8bn worldwide, up 22 per cent on a year ago. It was the highest level since before the credit crunch.

Ind  08 July 2011    Bankocracy Log    Bonus Culture    Merger Mania

Rupert Murdoch

World's wealthiest people now richer than before the credit crunch

According to the annual world wealth report by Merrill Lynch and Capgemini, the wealth of HNWIs around the world reached $42.7tn (£26.5tn) in 2010, rising nearly 10% in a year and surpassing the peak of $40.7tn reached in 2007, even as austerity budgets were implemented by many governments in the developed world.

The report also measures a category of "ultra-high net worth individuals" – those with at least $30m ...

The number of individuals in this super-rich bracket climbed 10% to a total of 103,000, and the total value of their investments jumped by 11.5% to $15tn, demonstrating that even among the rich, the richest get richer quicker ...

Altogether they represent less than 1% of the world's HNWIs – but they speak for 36% of HNWI's total wealth ...

Generally, HNWIs are most concentrated in the US, Japan and Germany: 53% of the world's most wealthy live in one of those three countries, but it is Asian-Pacific countries where the ranks of the rich are swelling fastest ...

Britain is lagging behind in the league of affluence ...

The growth in the number of rich individuals in the UK was among the slowest in the top 10 nations, showing a 1.4% rise to 454,000 and remaining below the 495,000 recorded in 2007 ...

Gdn  22 June 2011

Growing Inequality with Neoliberalism    Inequality, Consumerism & Biodiversity

Anger as pay for top FTSE bosses soars by a third

The economic crisis has had little effect on the pay of top executives of FTSE 100 companies in Britain, who saw their median pay increase by 32 per cent in the last year to an average of £3.5m.

During the same period, average earnings across the UK rose by 2 per cent – half the rate of inflation – meaning an effective pay cut for most. A report by the consultancy firm MM&K and the corporate governance specialists Manifest found the pay of executives in Britain had little relation to performance or shareholder value. The increase was more than treble the 9 per cent rise in the FTSE 100 share index over the same period.

The increase means that the executives of FTSE 100 companies earn more than 150 times the average wage in Britain.

Ind  31 May 2011

Gordon Gekko    Inequality

Plan to award 300 per cent bonuses triggers shareholder rebellion

The bank said 8.2 per cent of votes went against the remuneration report but, including abstentions, 18 per cent of voting shareholders refused to support it.

UK Financial Investments, which manages the Government's 41 per cent stake in Lloyds, voted in favour ...

Ind  19 May 2011    Bankocracy Log    Bonus Culture    Gordon Gekko

NHS chief executive pay has jumped by 4.5%

The basic pay of NHS chief executives has jumped by 4.5%, with median earnings now more than £150,000, research revealed today.

A study of boardroom pay in the health service by pay analysts Incomes Data Services also found a widening wage gap between foundation and non-foundation bosses ...

Foundation trusts have considerably more independence over the level of remuneration awarded to their executives, whereas others such as primary care and ambulance trusts are governed by prescribed guidelines determined by the Department of Health ...

Ind  10 May 2011

NHS 'Reform'

Rich list suggests UK richest seeing funds recovering

The UK's wealthiest people have rebounded from the recession increasing their worth by 18% in the past year, the Sunday Times Rich List says ...

A fortune of at least £70m is needed to get into the 2011 list, compared to £63m in 2010 and £55m in 2008 ...

Another new billionaire is Tory peer Lord Kirkham, 66, with his family, after selling sofa business DFS to private equity group Advent International.

The Kirkham family's wealth stands at £1bn, up from £430m last year ...

BBC NEWS  07 May 2011    Dystopia Log

Beware the destructive nature of greed    Gordon Gekko    Inequality    

Income Inequality: Too Big to Ignore

RBS to reveal 300 staff each paid average of more than £1m

Chairman Sir Philip Hampton has already admitted that more than 100 staff are paid more than £1m a year.

New disclosures will show the extent to which high pay is spread throughout the bank, although the average of £1m among the 300 or so staff will include many who earned less than that last year ...

RBS's figure for average pay per member of code staff, expected to be around £1m, will be roughly in line with HSBC, which has identified 280 of its top employees as code staff, earning an average of just over £1m.

Not all of these earned more than £1m, however; HSBC's chairman, Douglas Flint, has said that 253 staff were paid more than £1m.

The RBS numbers will also be considerably below the £2.4m average for the 231 code staff at Barclays, who were paid a combined £554m in 2010.

None of RBS's high earners will reach the levels reported by Barclays, which handed £110m to its five highest-paid bankers covered under the Merlin agreement.

HSBC is still the only bank to have confirmed the number of people it pays more than £1m.

Last week FSA chief executive Hector Sants told a select committee of MPs that the banks were not co-operating with his request to provide the committee with aggregate numbers of City bankers paid more than £1m.

Observer  13 Mar 2011

ITV pays Crozier £1.6m for his first eight months

According to the broadcaster's annual report, the former head of the Royal Mail was paid a basic salary of £532,000, plus another £334,000 "golden hello" on joining the company.

He also received a £252,000 short-term cash bonus and another £505,000 deferred in shares until 2013.

Mr Crozier was also issued more than four million nil-cost share options on joining the company last April ...

Independent  09 Mar 2011

The cheque's in the post

Barclays: Executives enriched, shareholders impoverished

Barclays remuneration report discloses that £100 invested in Barclays on 31 December 2005 would have been worth £53 - including dividends received - at the end of 2010, which most would describe as a hopeless performance ... the same £100 invested in all FTSE100 companies (a tiny bit of each company) would have increased in value to £126 over the same time period.

Or to tell you what you already know, returns on almost all our banks - including Barclays - have been lamentable ...

Can Bob Diamond be worth the £9m he received in pay and bonuses and the £15.2m in shares he also received from earlier incentive schemes that have just matured ..

Or to put it another way, how can executives be worth quite so much when the owners of the business, the shareholders, have lost so much money?

Here is another way of looking at the extent to which the owners have been punished: in 2007 Barclays' investors received dividends of 24p per share; in 2010, dividends were 5.5p per share.

If a 77% cut in the dividend isn't redolent of management failure, what is - and why haven't the owners instructed Barclays and the other banks to allocate less wonga for top executives and more for shareholders? ...

BBC NEWS  07 Mar 2011

RBS's top nine executives handed £28m in shares

Motivating RBS's Hester

The bankers are fighting back

To Barclays' shareholders, Bob Diamond is worth every penny of his £6.5m bonus

Bob Diamond gets £6.5m bonus

Shareholders get the bill for Lloyds shotgun wedding

FSA chairman backs tax on 'socially useless' banks

The socially useless City

Shareholder interest is a thing of the past

Cash-rich IMF plans to refurbish its 'opulent' headquarters

An IMF spokesman said the work was an essential overhaul of the 40-year-old premises and compared it to the need to put a new engine in a 20-year-old car.

"This is about the heating, the ventilation, the air-conditioning," he said. "This is work that can't be postponed."

Pressure groups greeted the news with scepticism, pointing out that eight years ago the fund spent $150m on a second building, complete with external waterfall, after saying its original site – known as HQ1 – was no longer big enough for its staff of highly-paid international officials.

They said the fund was now flush with cash after selling some of its stock of gold and extracting fees and interest payments from troubled countries such as Ireland and Greece.

Melinda St Louis, deputy director of Jubilee USA Network said:

"At this precarious time for the world's poor, the IMF has just earned at least $2bn [£1.2bn] in extra cash from gold sales and now proposes upgrading its already opulent office building in Washington DC ...

Observer  19 Dec 2010    G20

Bretton Woods Project

Jubilee USA Network

Moody's affirms the ascent of Man

While Ireland teeters on the brink of financial distress, there's better news across the water on the Isle of Man ...

The ratings agency Moody's last week affirmed an AAA rating on the modest isle of 80,000 people, ending a year-long review for possible negative downgrade.

The reason?

The tone of international debate on offshore economies "seems recently to have eased", according to Moody's experts, ending a threat to the Isle of Man's "business model".

In other words, an anticipated global crackdown on tax havens has failed to materialise ...

Observer  14 Nov 2010    Tax Dodgers

Investigation launched into soaring executive pay

The commission, which Compass stressed would be independent, will focus on top pay in the private sector and comes after research by Incomes Data Services that found the pay of boardroom bosses rose 55% in a year.

The average chief executive of a FTSE 100 company was paid a total of more than £4m.

[Deborah] Hargreaves said: "Pay at the top is one of the most pressing debates of the day. The forthcoming spending cuts will shift the public's focus even more onto the question of fairness and the gap between high and low pay."

The commission begins its analysis amid estimates that Barclays Capital has set aside another £1.5bn to pay its 25,000 staff on top of the £3bn pay and bonus pot that had been amassed half way through the year ...

Guardian  09 nov 2010    Corporate Sociopathy

Royal Bank of Scotland's bonus pot

FTSE 100 bosses criticised as boardroom pay leaps by 55%

Cable puts pay and takeovers at centre of City review

Compass calls on government to regulate high pay

Sir David Walker

Directors' pay rises by 2.5%, IoD reports

The Institute of Directors tonight defended executive pay, saying that the average pay rise for the 54% of UK company directors who received one this year was just 2.5%.

The IoD said that 46% of directors either had their pay frozen or cut, when adjusted for inflation. Its findings contrast with a recent Incomes Data Services survey which showed that the bosses of the FTSE 100 companies enjoyed a 55% pay surge, on average, over the past year.

Peter Boreham, head of executive reward at Hay Group, pointed out that the average figure is "skewed by a small number of large increases in high-performing companies".

The median, a more representative number, is less than half of this, at 23% – but higher than that awarded to employees outside the boardroom.

NE555
1 November 2010 12:24AM

The IoD said that 46% of directors either had their pay frozen or cut, when adjusted for inflation.

That means some still got an increase below or at inflation (3%), which is still more than most workers..

Many dircectors have more than one directorship, and in complex groups, may hold several directorships with different companies within that group but only get paid for their main directorship, any % of 0 is 0, but this may show in the statistics as a director not gettig a pay rise.

Also a lot of private companies are paying higher dividends instead of a pay rise, as a way round 50% tax.

The other problem is that the biggest rises are in the finance sectors and these are not the wealth creation sectors (unless you believe the PR)

All in all we are still not all in this together, this is all IOD puf

jon55
1 November 2010 12:57AM

The IoD analysis includes privately owned companies, most of which are small businesses. And for most of them, the directors interests are closely entwined with those of the company they manage.

But for publicly quoted companies, i.e. those whose shares are publicly available, the link between the interests of the company (i.e. shareholders) and directors is loose, to put it mildly. It is in the largest of these that IDS survey refers in it's analysis of Boardroom pay. That, as the IoD informs us, directors of small companies have not enjoyed big pay rises, merely demonstrates yet more firmly how the 'captains of industry' are a law unto themselves, handing each other great wads of shareholders money.

And as NE555 points out, many enjoy a number of jobs, which makes it easier to hand each other the companies money, as directors of one company sit on the Renumeration Committee of another, getting paid tens of thousands a year for doing so (a nice little extra to their rewards for their 'full time' directorship) and a similar Committee determines their pay. How many know that while Andy Hornby was CEO at HBOS, he was also on the Renumeration Committee of the Home Retail Group, and was paid £67.000 a year to help decide that companies directors pay.

What protects these scroungers in big business from having their pay decided by what the owners are prepared to pay and no more, (known as market forces, you know, what the IoD says is so good for the rest of us) is that the law enables directors of publicly quoted companies to virtually treat the company as if they own it. So, change the law! Ah, but they've thought of that. Those who make the law, MP's and Lords, are given lucrative company directorships, some even sitting on the tame Renumeration Committees that show such generosity to the directors.

To sum up, the whole political/big business establishment is corrupt to it's core.

Guardian  31 Oct 2010    

CEOs - The More You Cut, The More You Get Paid

Guardian executive pay survey 2009

Executive pay and bonuses

UK boardroom pays leaps 55% in a year

Incomes Data Services said bonuses paid to directors of FTSE 100 companies increased by 34%, while basic pay rose by 3.6%.

The amount of money waiting to be disgorged from long-term incentive schemes soared by 73%, to a total of £259m, and share option gains leapt by 90%.

The FTSE 100 rose by less than a fifth over the same period.

Steve Tatton of IDS said the report suggested that companies returned to "business as usual" once the recession ended.

"It seems the days of earnings restraint were short-lived. It is as though the recession never happened," Tatton warned ...

Guardian  28 Oct 2010    Corporate Sociopathy Log

'Bonus buyouts' signal return of banks' confidence – and wealth

Headhunter reports sharp rise in poaching of star employees by buying out multi-year bonus packages upfront ...

Jonathan Nicholson, managing director at Astbury Marsden, said:

"Banks are now prepared to buy out 100% of a potential employee's shares or options they have locked up with their current employer."

Four-fifths of new recruitments now involve such bonus buyouts, compared with one in five a year ago.

A fifth of these bonuses are bought out by paying the new employee cash upfront, with the rest in the form of new employee shares and share options.

Astbury Marsden said that bonus buyouts have accelerated in the last month as banks try to poach their rivals' best earners before Christmas, when fewer people change jobs.

Deutsche Bank, which reported third quarter results today, said it had set aside €4.6bn (£4bn) in bonus pool for its corporate and investment bank over the first nine months, amounting to €285,000 per employee.

Nicholson added: "Banks and fund managers are confident about next year and they still want to add to their teams. Within reason, they are willing to pay for the talent.

"A successful trader or banker will now no longer move unless their entire share bonus scheme is bought out.

"A year ago they would have been more flexible – now they don't want to forgo a penny." ...

Guardian  27 Oct 2010    Corporate Sociopathy    Banking Commission    Fractional Reserve Banking

How Speculators Are Crippling the Copper Industry

This year, the price (of copper) went from $6,400 in February to $8,000 in April, then plunged to $6,100 and is currently rushing back up toward $8,900 ...

The metal has become an object of speculation ...

Price movements have less and less to do with the product itself ...

In Manhattan ... 12 men are sitting at a round table in a windowless room ... these men are copper traders who have gathered at the New York Mercantile Exchange ...

They trade in futures contracts, or agreements that obligate them to sell highly pure copper at a fixed price on a specific date.

Each contract represents about 11 tons, with a current market value of roughly $95,000.

Sometimes they go "long," which means betting that prices will rise. Or they take short positions when they expect prices to fall.

These traders no longer have any interest whatsoever in the metal itself.

Traders today deal in unimaginable sums worldwide, with securities worth more than $20 billion changing hands every day ...

Der Spiegel  21 Oct 2010    Hedge Funds

Goldman Sachs earmarks $13bn for bonuses

The Goldman Sachs bonus bonanza continued yesterday as the investment bank set aside $13.1bn for its wealthy employees to share for the work they have performed during the first nine months of the year.

That amounts to 43 per cent of revenues, with an average payment to each of its 34,500 staff of $370,706 (£234,000).

However, the best-paid bankers will earn considerably more because the workforce includes support staff who are paid just a fraction of the dizzying sums taken home by their bosses ...

Independent  20 Oct 2010    Goldman Sachs

Let's make CEOs justify their wages

The facts about income inequality in the UK are nothing less than mind-boggling.

The average income of a FTSE 100 chief executive, according to the most recent Guardian survey of executive pay, is over £3m per year, including bonuses and pension contributions.

This is more than 100 times median household income.

It is not uncommon for CEOs to run 200 or 300 times as much as the median pay of their employees or, in the case of Terry Leahy's final year at Tesco, for a CEO to be paid 500 times the average take-home pay of his colleagues.

Moreover, executive pay continues to march relentlessly upwards, unconnected to skill, judgment or underlying profitability.

While the FTSE lost a third of its value in the year to September 2009, executive pay rose 10% during the same period.

According to the Work Foundation, the ratio of average CEO pay to average UK earnings rose from 10:1 in 1980 to 75:1 in 2006 (and has continued to grow since).

In short, the gains of economic growth are becoming increasingly concentrated in a small number of hands, while the wages of ordinary people have stagnated ...

Guardian  19 Oct 2010    Inequality

Corporate Governance

Executive Pay & Bonuses

Banks' £7bn bonus pool condemned by unions

As ordinary Britons woke up to George Osborne's latest round of axe-swinging, the City simply shrugged its collective shoulders and got back to what it does best – feathering the bonus nests.

The Centre for Economics & Business Research (CEBR) will today forecast that London's financial elite will share £7bn in bonuses this year.

That makes an average payout of £70,000, based on its estimate of 100,000 workers in London's financial sector.

But with significant numbers of support staff contained within that figure, who receive little if anything, the actual average will be much higher ...

Next year's pool is expected to reach £7.4bn, then £7.8bn in 2012, £8.8bn in 2013 and nearly £10bn in 2014. The 50 per cent top rate of tax does mean the state will, ultimately, benefit from the City's largesse ...

Independent  05 Oct 2010    Recovery: The Achilles Heel

Liberal Democrats call for draconian tax on bank bonuses

HSBC's Geoghegan to get £17m after losing out on chairman role

Mike Geoghegan is to walk away from HSBC with cash and shares worth a potential £17m at the end of a 37-year career that will end next March after a tussle for control at the top of one of the world's biggest banks ...

... Geoghegan's position as chief executive to is to be taken by the current head of the investment bank Stuart Gulliver ...

Gulliver is another "casino banker" and was HSBC's highest-paid employee last year, earning £10m.

He will now receive a pay cut, with a £1.25m salary and potential to receive up to four times that in bonuses.

He has tried to defend bonuses in the past, likening the situation to needing to pay Hollywood stars ...

The decision to resign had been his, he said, and had not been prompted by a row over whether non-executive director John Thornton, a former Goldman Sachs banker, should be named as chairman ...

Guardian  24 Sept 2010    

HSBC attacked over Geoghegan severance deal

Barclays' appointment of Bob Diamond stirs call for banks break-up

Barclays confirms Bob Diamond as new chief

The decision to elevate Diamond, whose pay packets have catapulted him towards the top of the high pay league for a number of years, allows the current chief executive John Varley to leave next March and has heightened speculation that Barclays will become increasingly focused on investment banking rather than its traditional high street business ...

As part of his elevation to Barclays chief executive, Diamond will in effect be forced to take a pay cut.

As the head of Barclays Capital, the investment banking arm, he took a basic salary of £250,000 but earned around 100 times that through bonuses and share incentive packages – standing to receive as much as £60m in the years ahead.

The bank has admitted today that while his basic salary will rise to around £1.3m, his earning potential will be scaled back so that he will be able to earn around 7.5 times this amount in bonuses – a pay structure that will be more familiar to other bosses of FTSE 100 companies and capping his bonus potential for the first time.

His potential maximum pay is now around £11.5m ...

Guardian  07 Sept 2010    Boris Johnson    Fractional Reserve Banking

Bank bosses' bonuses will not be deserved

All thanks to 'Keynes Lite'

Bankers are starting to feel good again. Anyone who attended the last round of results presentations could see that for themselves ...

Profits have returned. It's bonus time again! ...

If January shows a continuation of the banking sector's recovery, S&P's analysts say it won't be down to managements ...

In the view of S&P, "the more important contributory factors [to the improvement in performance] were the developments beyond the control of the banks' management".

These were government stimulus packages, the partial recovery of property markets, and the relatively resilient employment market ...

In other words, this time they got lucky ... S&P's report is worth filing away for when bank bosses start talking about how they deserve the multimillion-pound bonuses they will be paying themselves at the end of the year.

Independent  27 Aug 2010    Fractional Reserve Banking

Tory backlash over ‘tainted treasurer’

Tory MPs last night demanded a change in the way the party is run after the resignation of David Rowland as treasurer.

They pointed the finger of blame for the affair at David Cameron and his Oxford University friend Andrew Feldman, the party's co-chairman.

Mr Rowland, a multi-millionaire property tycoon and former tax exile who was once branded 'a shady financier' in Parliament, quit on Thursday even before he had taken up the post ...

Mr Cameron was repeatedly warned by major donors Lord Ashcroft and Michael Spencer, the outgoing treasurer, that he should not give the job to Mr Rowland because it risked damaging the reputation of the party ...

Daily Mail  21 Aug 2010    David Cameron

Cameron's new treasurer quits before he starts

Tax exile, 'shady financier'

Multimillionaire who courted controversy

The dirty past of the former tax exile who's the new Tory Treasurer

The True Face of the Tories

Sir Philip Green to conduct external review of coalition's spending cuts

Government enlists fashion chain billionaire to head team of officials in Cabinet Office and Treasury ...

Green ... will head a team of officials in the Cabinet Office and Treasury looking at the last three years of spending to identify inefficiencies and savings.

In particular, he will look at whether leases and contracts entered into in 2007 were good value.

Green will report to the minister for the Cabinet Office, Francis Maude, and chief secretary to the Treasury, Danny Alexander, before the end of the spending review.

The review winds up on 20 October and will set out cuts of 25% to 40% in Whitehall departments that are not ringfenced.

The coalition moved quickly within days of taking office to commit to making immediate savings of £6.2bn this year, but the appointment could cause some discomfort within the financial echelons of government.

Vince Cable, now the business, innovation and skills secretary, vehemently criticised Green's appointment to advise the previous Labour government on account of his tax status ...

Guardian  12 Aug 2010    Corporate State Britain    Tax Dodgers

Philip Green's tax affairs should be investigated

Unions hit out at appointment of Sir Philip Green

The rewards of tax avoidance

Bonuses are up – so the economy must be doing well, right?

We're all in it together?

It is only in mahogany-panelled boardrooms that things are looking up ...

Executive pay specialists Hewitt New Bridge Street have released their annual report on packages in the FTSE 100, which shows that although companies have been more restrained on basic salary awards, bonuses have risen.

Median pay for the highest paid directors in the FTSE 100 has risen from around £2.5m to £3m, and the typical bonus earned was about 120% of salary ...

The main problem with the bonus spiral ... is social.

It is divisive to have a super-class operating several cloud levels above the rest of society, being rewarded for activities that are not always obviously beneficial to society as a whole.

A couple of modest proposals: bonuses should be a fraction of salary, not a multiple, and FTSE 100 executives should sign up for Warren Buffett's charity drive.

Guardian  11 Aug 2010

Growing Inequality    Is capitalism the only game in town?    Pawns or Players?

Company bosses enjoy £500,000 pay increases

Corporate pay Britain

'Fat cats' still have some slimming to do

How incentive bar was set so low that executives could hardly fail

Older workers 'trapped in long-term unemployment'

Youth unemployment for two years or more soars by 42pc

Youth unemployment rising in most regions

Corus redundancies a stark contrast to Adams payout

Executives deserve high rewards when their activities and innovations benefit society, but lavish payments are distasteful when they leave a trail of unemployment and traumatised families in their wake. The contrast between Adams's circumstances and those of the redundant steelworkers does not need spelling out.

In a concurrent article, Ruth Sutherland raises the issue of the

     " ... the mainstream Anglo-Saxon male template ... "

within not only the MPC but economics in general.

The current economic template is oriented towards market norms and needs rebalancing to give more weight to social norms.

I know generalities are very dangerous, but since women tend to more social than men - Margaret Thatcher excepted - the importance of this rebalancing cannot be over-stated.

The current model of the corporation is solely market-norms oriented, as this report once again demonstrates.

The loss of a thousand jobs gives rise to a collective shrug of the corporate shoulders: "it's not our problem".

The financial costs pass to the state, which may not take into account of the social costs - family breakdown, mental illness, impact on children - I am sure you can add to the baleful list.

But no one in power questions the line of travel, because market norms are the only show in town, and 'the show' is in the interests of politicians of all parties.

Observer  01 Aug 2010    Corporate Sociopathy

Outgoing Corus boss paid £2m last year

A good woman economist is hard to find

Big earners are still safe in their glass towers

The FSA may talk as if it's getting tough on the City, but it seems it has already run out of steam ...

In a detailed report, the FSA shows that of the 27 firms netted by its first regulatory trawl, 2,800 bankers got more than £1m, almost 90% of the total in bonuses.

Thousands more lower down the food chain also benefited from bonuses, usually worth at least 80% of their total income ...

Safe from the protests of ignorant consumers and from intervention by a government fearful of killing the golden goose, banks feel secure.

A little heat could be applied by the agents whom consumers pay to handle their money. Fund managers, pension trustees and independent financial advisers could exercise some control to the benefit of ordinary savers.

It does not happen and is unlikely to happen when this small and shadowy group are under instruction to maximise short-term profit for their customers.

They also benefit from fees and commissions that oil the industry's wheels.

The FSA chairman Lord Turner famously said that much banking activity was socially useless.

It's a pity the debate he sparked last year already seems to have run out of steam.

Guardian  29 July 2010    Commission on Banking    Fractional Reserve Banking

Fresh bonus fears as bank profits rise

Banks ignore pleas and cut loans to the real economy again

Almost 3,000 City staff took home more than £1m last year

BP makes record loss as Tony Hayward quits

BP has reported one of the largest losses in British corporate history because of the cost of the catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and confirmed this morning that embattled chief executive Tony Hayward is leaving the company.

In its second-quarter results the company has set aside $32.2bn (£20.7bn) to meet the cost of the clean-up, far higher than the City had expected and plunging the company into a $17bn loss, compared with a profit last year of $3.1bn.

To pay for the mounting costs of the spill created by the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig on 20 April, BP plans to sell $30bn worth of assets – predominantly oil and gas fields – over the next 18 months.

Hayward will receive a £1m payoff and a pension expected to be worth about half a million pounds a year.

He will be replaced by an American, Bob Dudley, a BP veteran who is currently overseeing the clean-up of the oil spill.

Hayward, who will quit his post as chief executive in October and leave the board the following month, will become a non-executive director of the firm's Russian joint venture TNK-BP ...

Hayward ... is leaving after almost 30 years with BP.

The company said that under the terms of his contract he will receive a year's salary in lieu of notice, amounting to £1.045m.

He will also leave with a pension pot worth over £10m ...

Guardian  27 July 2010    Corporate Sociopathy Log

BP was 'a model of corporate social responsibility'

Goldman Sachs profits hit by tax, fine and poor trading

It couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of sociopaths. Pass me the Kleenex.

Goldman Sachs has reported a sharp fall in second-quarter profits after being hit by the UK's bonus tax, a US fine and poor trading revenues.

Net income came in at $613m (£404m), down from $3.4bn a year ago.

But even ignoring the $600m accrued tax in the UK, and the US regulator's record $550m fine, underlying profits fell by nearly half.

The result was driven by a drop in revenues from Goldman's traders, which fell 39% from a year ago ...

Accrued employee compensation for the quarter - which includes the bonus pool - was $3.8bn, down 43% from a year ago.

This means that average accrued pay per employee at the firm for the first six months of the year was $273,000 ...

BBC NEWS  20 July 2010    Goldman Sachs

Hedge funds accused of gambling with lives of the poorest as food prices soar

• Commodity speculators push cocoa to 33-year high
• Bets 'risk the most vulnerable in the world starving'

The WDM's Great Hunger Lottery report says "risky and secretive" financial bets on food prices have exacerbated the effect of poor harvests in recent years. It argues that volatility in food prices has made it harder for producers to plan what to grow, pushed up prices for British consumers and in poorer countries risks sparking civil unrest, like the food riots seen in Mexico and Haiti in 2008.

Deborah Doane, WDM director, said: "Investment banks, like Goldman Sachs, are making huge profits by gambling on the price of everyday foods. But this is leaving people in the UK out of pocket, and risks the poorest people in the world starving.

"Nobody benefits from this kind of reckless gambling except a few City wheeler-dealers. British consumers suffer because it pushes up inflation, because of unpredictable oil and raw material prices, and the world's poorest people suffer because basic foods become unaffordable."

Guardian  19 July 2010

Food Speculation

Executive Summary

Take the highest stakes, riskiest economic behaviour ever devised, and marry it to the most fundamental basic need of humankind, and you have the subject of this report.

Over the past decade, the world’s most powerful financial institutions have developed ever more elaborate ways to package, re-package and trade a range of financial contracts known as derivatives.

A derivative is not based on an exchange of tangible assets such as goods or money, but rather is a financial contract with a value linked to the expected future price movements of the underlying asset.

Derivative contracts are traded on a growing number of underlying assets, from share prices, to mortgages, bonds, commodity prices, foreign exchange rates, and even index of prices.

Derivatives trading has been one of the most lucrative parts of the financial industry, but it is the increasingly complex, opaque and disconnected nature of these and similar products that ultimately triggered the collapse of the banks and the worst financial crisis in human history.

Of course, the financial crisis has been an economic disaster of seismic proportions for millions around the world, plunging many countries into recession causing millions to be thrown out of work, soaring public debts and cuts in vital public services.

But while betting on the value of sub-prime mortgages or foreign currency values undoubtedly leads to disastrous consequences, there is another area where the speculative behaviour of the world’s largest banks and hedge funds represents a threat to the very survival of people: food commodities.

In The great hunger lottery, World Development Movement has compiled extensive evidence establishing the role of food commodity derivatives in destabilising and driving up food prices around the world.

This in turn, has led to food prices becoming unaffordable for low-income families around the world, particularly in developing countries highly reliant on food imports.

Nowhere was this more clearly seen than during the astonishing surge in staple food prices over the course of 2007-2008, when millions went hungry and food riots swept major cities around the world.

The great hunger lottery shows how this alarming episode was fueled by the behaviour of financial speculators, and describes the terrible immediate impacts on vulnerable families around the world, as well as the long term damage to the fight against global poverty.

In the report we describe how the current situation came to pass, the risks of another speculation induced food crisis, and what specifically can be done by policymakers here in the UK as well as in the US and EU to tackle the problem.

But at its heart, The great hunger lottery carries a very straightforward message: allowing gambling on hunger in financial markets is dangerous, immoral and indefensible.

And it needs to be stopped before any more people suffer to satisfy the greed of the banks.

WDM: Full Report .pdf  July 2010

Corporate Sociopathy    Economic Democracy    Fractional Reserve Banking    'Golden Sacks'

WDM

Choc Finger's Big Bet

Goldman Sachs

Goldman Sachs: Annual Report .pdf

Staff at nuclear decommissioning quango paid £5m in bonuses

Chairman Stephen Henwood admits to 'shortcomings' in bonus structure as rewards increase by a third ...

A spokesman for the NDA said that senior managers received between £15,000 and £20,000 in bonuses last year and that the average bonus was about £12,000.

According to its annual report, executive directors were awarded £65,000 each.

The NDA is responsible for decommissioning the UK's old reactors, estimated at costing £73bn.

It is supposed to fund about half its annual clean-up budget through its commercial activities, such as operating the remaining Magnox reactors and reprocessing spent fuel.

The rest is paid for by the taxpayer, via the energy department.

But recently, lower income and higher decommissioning costs mean funding the NDA takes up two thirds of the energy department's annual budget.

During the year corresponding to last year's pay-outs – 2008/2009 – the NDA increased its income by over £500m largely as a result of higher electricity prices ...

Guardian  16 July 2010    Corporate Public 'Sevices'

M&S investor revolt

Put it another way, Grauniad: more than 83% voted 'yes'. Some revolt!

More than 16% of shareholders abstain or vote against 'golden hello' for Marc Bolland

Bolland, who was lured from Morrisons, is getting a basic salary of £950,000, an annual bonus of up to 250% of his salary and an exceptional share award worth another 400% of his basic pay.

In addition, M&S has handed him £7.5m of bonuses to "buy him out" of retention incentives at his former job ...

Guardian  14 July 2010

Executive pay rises while shareholder earnings fall

The pay packages enjoyed by Britain's top directors are increasingly out of step with the actual performance of their companies, a report claims today.

Chief executives of FTSE 100 companies have seen their remuneration rise by 5% to an average of £3.1m since 2008, while earnings per share fell by 1% over the same period, according to the Total Remuneration 2010 survey by pay consultants MM&K and corporate governance group Manifest.

Over the past 10 years chief executive remuneration has quadrupled while share prices have declined, suggesting little or no link between rewards, performance and shareholder value, according to MM&K and Manifest.

The report said there had been a shift towards increasingly expensive, short term reward strategies, such as annual bonuses.

"This mirrors the approach that caused so many problems in the banking sector," it said. "Furthermore, as most remuneration strategies now involve the use of long term incentive plans, reward horizons have shortened to only three years. A decade ago, when share options were the favoured incentive, the horizon average was seven to ten years."

iaoutfls
5 Jul 2010, 8:31AM

There is a wider issue here which is that the major institutional shareholders (pension funds, etc) have been asleep on the job, not wanting any negative profile because they are more interested in getting new customers and money in.

The result is they have been failing to challenge management not just on pay but also proper stewardship of businesses versus a short term approach...look at the suggestions BP has been cutting corners on safety, the Pru's fortunately failed attempt to massively overpay for a huge acquisition, several misguided forays and over expansion by the banks ...

... it seems to me there is a strong argument for creating a framework that financially encourages long term ownership from the major institutions...even a 1% benefit in tax provided they held shares for a suitably long average period would obligate them to review the current churn approach where they actually hold shares for less time on average than private investors ...

Another obvious action is to make voting at AGMs compulsory for these institutions. this could easily be monitored via the FSA or its replacement.

The current system of non-binding votes on pay after the event is ludicrous ...

Guardian  05 July 2010    Corporate Sociopathy Log

Olympics officials among quango chiefs who earn more than PM

" ... some had given up well-paid jobs to work on the Olympics ... "

Bosses at the ODA have been accused of being the "bankers of the Olympics" by London politicians for refusing to curb their salaries and bonuses at a time when the public sector faces a pay freeze and job losses.

The ODA has defended the lucrative pay packages, saying they reflected the need to pay the market rate and recruit the best-qualified people, pointing out that some had given up well-paid jobs to work on the Olympics.

Mr Armitt said last year: "We are a market economy and we pay people according to the salaries they can demand, according to the skills they have. I'm not considering reducing my salary and I certainly would not dream of asking to reduce the chief executive's."

The second-highest basic salary is paid to Tony Fountain, the chief executive of the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, which is responsible for dealing with nuclear waste.

In addition to his pay of £365,000 to £369,999, he receives a £70,810 allowance in lieu of a pension and is currently being paid £91,000 relocation costs, bringing his total package from the taxpayer to more than £520,000. Mr Fountain joined the NDA last October from BP ...

Independent  02 July 2010

Olympics 2012 authority tops quango rich list

Quango chiefs' salaries revealed

No austerity for Cabinet heavyweight Eric Pickles with new £70k Jaguar XJ

No austerity for Cabinet heavyweight Eric Pickles, Jabba the Hutt’s flabbier brother.

The well-padded Communities Secretary is resting his buttocks on the luxurious leather seats of a chauffeur-driven £70,000 Jaguar XJ.

Eric the Hutt’s traded up from the £20,000 eco-friendly Toyota Prius of Labour predecessor John Denham.

Perhaps outsized Pickles is unable to squeeze into a family car, but it stinks when his spending cuts will sack care workers, binmen, dinner ladies and librarians.

Seeing Monday night’s Commons gridlock created by official cars it’s clear we’re not all in this together.

ConDem Ministers are behaving like the power-crazed pigs in Animal Farm who lord it over other creatures.

Cuts for us, bigger cars for them – nothing’s too good for Westminster hypocrites preaching austerity, eh Eric?

Daily Mirror  30 June 2010    

Former QinetiQ boss gets £1.1m golden goodbye

Graham Love, the former chief executive of QinetiQ, has received £1.1m in golden goodbye, performance payouts and consultancy fees despite being blamed by his successor for a financial crisis at the embattled defence technology group and presiding over an "insufficiently commercial" culture.

The cash and shares payouts came on top of salary and benefits of £430,000 Love earned in the seven months before his resignation last October, according to QinetiQ's annual report out today.

His pay has proved a constant source of controversy ever since the group's stock market flotation four years ago. He was awarded shares worth £21m when it joined the market, cashing in £6m a year later to fund a divorce. He is thought to retain about 5m shares, worth almost £6m.

Love's successor Leo Quinn, who received a golden hello of £600,000, last month suspended the dividend for 12 months, warning investors to expect two years of falling revenue and the 13,000 staff to prepare for job cuts of 10% ...

Guardian  25 June 2010    Corporate Sociopathy Log    Corporate State Britain

Treasury raises £257m in Qinetiq share sale

'Excessive' rewards for Qinetiq chiefs

MPs cry foul on MoD PFI

Qinetiq consortium wins bulk of £16bn MoD contract

Greed of the highest order

Inquiry launched into QinetiQ profiting

Qinetiq's £1bn flotation 'will sell taxpayer short'

Anger as £1.3bn float of Qinetiq gets away

Geeks With Guns

Network Rail bonuses 'daylight robbery'

Network Rail (NR) today announced six-figure bonuses for its top directors, sparking a storm of protest led by Transport Secretary Philip Hammond.

Last month, Mr Hammond wrote to NR urging restraint and pointing out the company's top management already enjoyed "handsome" annual salaries.

But today, NR said its top directors were getting bonuses totalling more than £2.25 million, including £641,000 for chief executive Iain Coucher whose annual salary is £613,000 ...

There was ... criticism from the Office of Rail Regulation (ORR) whose chief executive Bill Emery had branded NR's performance for 2009/10 "mixed" and who had also written to NR warning about the level of bonuses.

The ORR said it was now up to NR's remuneration committee - which had decided on the bonuses - to "fully justify how it has reached its decisions" ....

Independent  24 June 2010

Marks & Spencer chief's pay more than doubles to £4.3m

Sir Stuart Rose, who steps down as chief executive at the end of next month, rewarded with 140% increase in salary and bonuses despite lacklustre performance of group ...

The scale of the boardroom payouts is likely to further inflame M&S shareholders, some of whom have already made it known that they intend to vote against the M&S pay report in protest at the package handed to Marc Bolland, who will take over from Rose next month. Bolland could earn up to £15m in his first year, with £4.9m guaranteed, regardless of performance.

Over the past two years M&S's relationship with its shareholders has deteriorated, as the retailer has failed to comply with corporate governance guidelines and tested investors' patience with generous incentive schemes. Rose is due to hand control of the retail empire to Bolland at the end of July. At that point he will become part-time chairman, with a salary of £875,000 – making him the highest paid non-executive chairman of a FTSE 100 company. He is due to leave by the end of March next year.

In the annual report, remuneration committee chairman Steven Holliday, chief executive of National Grid, said Bolland's pay was designed to "attract and retain leaders who are focused and encouraged to deliver business priorities within a framework that is aligned with the interests of the company's shareholders".

Guardian  10 June 2010    Corporate Sociopathy Log

Bankers' earnings surge towards pre-crash levels

Pay and bonuses totalled £20.5bn in four months to April, compared with £24bn at height of boom in 2007 ...

The steep rise in earnings is likely to put pressure on the coalition government to impose a clampdown on City pay practices, which the Liberal Democrats in particular attacked while in opposition.

Guardian analysis of data from the Office for National Statistics shows that bankers were paid £8.5bn in bonuses in the four months to April, compared with £7bn during the same period last year.

There was also a jump in pay across the industry of £1bn to £12bn as bankers shifted some of their earnings away from bonuses to avoid the former Labour government's bonus tax ...

Guardian  13 May 2010    Corporate Sociopathy    Economic Democracy

Barclays Capital's bonus and pay set at £1.4bn after strong first quarter

Good to know the recession's over at Barclays, isn't it?

• Barclays first-quarter profits at £1.8bn, 47% up on 2009
• BarCap profits up 62%, with 38% of income set for bonuses

Chief executive John Varley highlighted a fall in impairments to £1.5bn, down 35%, for helping to fuel the group's total profits.

"I am pleased with the strong growth in profits which we have delivered this quarter. Diversification of our business and risk, and good underlying performance, have combined to produce this result. The improvement that we have seen in impairment reflects the signs of economic recovery now evident in many of the markets in which we operate," Varley said ...

Guardian  30 April 2010    

Fortunes of super-rich soar by a third

THE richest people in Britain have seen a record boom in wealth over the past year.

Their fortunes have soared by 30% even though much of the UK is struggling to recover from recession and the near-collapse of the banking system.

It is the largest rise in wealth since the list was first published 21 years ago.

Much of the increase is a result of the rebound in stock markets and property values after the government injected hundreds of billions of pounds into banks and the wider economy to stave off collapse ...

... the 1,000 richest people in the country increased their wealth by £77 billion last year, bringing their total wealth to £335.5 billion — equal to more than one-third of the national debt.

The number of billionaires has risen from 43 to 53, with nine seeing their wealth rise by £1 billion or more during the past 12 months ...

Times  25 Apr 2010    Inequality

Invasion of the booty snatchers: how greed is spreading out from the City

"People are just the new domesticated livestock to be exploited"

Blogger Halo572 has it right. It used to be said of the army that the squaddies were considered to be Class C stores: easily replaced. This is the, er, 'thinking' behind the mechanistic modelling of human beings to accept the grotesque disparities in wealth which, according to Lord Griffiths - vice-chairman of Goldman Sachs - is an essential pre-requisite to, er, "greater prosperity for all". Goldman Sachs is no stranger to the hubris that comes with globalised wealth, it's CEO having previously informed us that he and his colleagues are "doing God's work". Milton Friedman has, presumably, had a word with the Almighty since moving over to hobnob with Adam Smith, and all that Sermon on the Mount stuff has been quietly abandoned.

Richard Lambert, the director general of the CBI, recently warned the small corporate elite being paid enormous sums that they seemed to "occupy a different galaxy from the rest of the community" and risked being treated like beings from another planet.

His words appear to have had little effect.

This year's season of annual meetings is shaping up to be a stormy one as executives defy the credit crunch with enormous rewards packages ...

Roger Bootle of Capital Economics says: "The pay culture of the City has affected expectations elsewhere. The whole climate is relevant here, because bad pay practices drive out the good ... Executive pay reflects a deeper underlying failure revealed by the banking crisis. The whole system of boards and non-executives has been a major failure. And scrutiny by shareholders hasn't worked." ...

In the decade to 2009, the average FTSE 100 chief executive has seen his rewards jump 125%, while the heads of smaller quoted firms have seen their pay increase by 80%, according to remuneration specialists.

This contrasts markedly with the experience of the rest of the population.

As Lambert pointed out, in 2000 the average chief executive earned 47 times as much as an average employee, but that ratio has now swelled to 81 times.

Figures from the Institute for Fiscal Studies show that, in the past decade, real income growth in almost all households was under 1% ...

Observer  18 Apr 2010    Corporate Sociopathy    Inequality

Goldman Sachs finds $5bn for pay and bonuses amid fraud investigation

Bosses stir up executive pay row with mega salary packages

The boss of Xstrata, Mick Davis, banked almost £29m for 2009, providing a potential embarrassment for the Conservatives as he is a high profile supporter of their campaign against the government's proposed increase in national insurance ...

Meanwhile Matt Emmens, chairman of Shire Pharmaceuticals, the drugs group that abandoned the UK two years ago and moved its headquarters to Ireland for tax purposes, made £10.5m despite only being a non-executive director.

News of the bumper payouts comes hard on the heels of details of the salary and bonus awarded last year to the boss of Reckitt Benckiser, owner of Cillit Bang kitchen cleaner.

The publicity-shy Dutchman Bart Becht smashed all previous payout records by collecting more than £90m in cash and shares in one year, the equivalent of £2.85 every second.

That payout followed his collection of £36.8m in 2008 when he topped the Guardian's annual pay survey of FTSE 100 bosses.

Since 2005 he has collected more than £200m.

It also comes after the CBI director general, Richard Lambert, warned that bosses risked being regarded as "aliens" living in "a different galaxy from the rest of the community" because of the fast-widening gap between average pay and boardroom handouts.

"For the first time in history it has become possible for a manager – as opposed to an owner – of a large public company to become seriously rich," he told a business audience last month ...

Guardian  11 Apr 2010    Corporate Sociopathy    Inequality

NHS executives' pay soars by 7% a year

Executive pay and bonuses

Gas chief pockets £28m after 26 per cent dip in profits

His remuneration included a base salary of £1.1m and a reduced cash bonus of £1.6m. The largest part of the remainder of the package came from Mr Chapman's exercising £15.5m of share options in September ...

Independent  05 April 2010    Corporate Sociopathy    Inequality

Town Hall Rich List 2010

Key Findings

• At least 1,250 council staff enjoyed remuneration of £100,000 or more in 2008-09. This is up from 1,099 in 2007-08, a 14 per cent increase.

• There were 166 earning over £150,000 in 2008-09. This is up from 135 in 2007-08.

• The average remuneration package for those on the Rich List was £125,745, or £2,418 a week.

• The average pay rise for the people on our list was 5 per cent. This is compared with a 2.7 per cent pay rise for a nurse and 2.3 per cent pay rise for a teacher.

• In 2008-09, 31 council staff earned more than the Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister. This is up from 19 people in 2007-08, a 63 percent increase. 219 received more money than cabinet ministers in 2008-09.

• Based on our responses, the county council with the most staff earning £100,000 or more is Kent with 27. The metropolitan district with the most is Liverpool with 22.

TaxPayers' Alliance  01 April 2010

Rise in top council earners

Barclays president's £60m pay deal

The bumper pay deal awarded to Bob Diamond, one of the City's wealthiest bank chiefs, came despite attempts by the government to curb the amounts paid to high-flying bankers.

The package is based on a £384,000 salary, but through a combination of perks including share bonuses, Mr Diamond – who was praised for waiving his bonus last year – could earn more than 150 times that amount.

Barclays's annual report yesterday revealed that Mr Diamond, the head of Barclays Capital, earned £26.8 million through selling his shares in Barclays Global Investors.

He was also given £6 million in Barclays shares, with the possibility of earning another £12m in shares over two years if performance related targets are hit.

Mr Diamond, 58, also made £15.6 million from two sets of bonuses he was awarded in 2005 under a long-term incentive scheme ...

Telegraph  20 Mar 2010

Bob Diamond

Let's call the bluff of the tax whingers

Let's not bother about child protection, the elderly, and those with learning disabilities facing cuts in Birmingham because they're not our problem. Another Bollie anyone?

One by one, they are coming out of the woodwork. On Tuesday, it was the boss of independent financial adviser Hargreaves Lansdown whingeing about the forthcoming 50p top rate of income tax (he paid himself an abnormally large dividend to get in first).

Yesterday, it was the turn of Diageo, the drinks giant, to warn that it might have to move its headquarters to another domicile if UK tax becomes "egregious" for corporates or individuals.

Apparently, Diageo is finding it hard to attract top staff to London, so concerned are they about the tax bills they might face.

It could, of course, relocate some of the 900 employees it is letting go at its Johnnie Walker bottling plant in Kilmarnock – a vociferous local campaign to save the historic facility has failed – but that doesn't seem to have occurred to it ...

The bottom line is that taxes are going to rise in the years ahead whichever political party is in government.

Corporate citizens of the UK will have to share some of that pain with individuals. Their bellyaching is, at best, boring.

In the case of Diageo, which expects local people to put up with the painful closure of that Kilmarnock site, it looks positively selfish.

Independent 10 Feb 2010

Blue chips threaten tax exodus

Slashing corporation tax

City bonuses soar despite super tax

Diageo hits out at UK tax regime

Unilever threatens to pull out of Britain over rising taxes

Birmingham city council to cut up to 2,000 jobs and close care homes

The cheque's in the post: £2m bonus for departing Crozier

ITV's new chief executive, Adam Crozier, could walk away from his old job at the head of Royal Mail with £2m in bonuses. The broadcaster appointed Crozier, who has no television experience and is the second highest-paid public sector worker, to the top role after a long and occasionally tortuous 10-month search.

Crozier will be rewarded from a three-year bonus scheme based on efficiency targets at the postal operator, which has recently been hit by a series of national strikes over mounting workloads.

Archie Norman, ITV's chairman, said Crozier, who is the former head of the Football Association, had the "steely resolve we need at ITV", which was looking for a "great leader" ...

Guardian  28 Jan 2010

Royal Mail delivery tests 'rigged'

How 'high quality' service helped four Royal Mail bosses earn £310,000 in bonuses

ITV could reward Adam Crozier with £14m pay and bonus package

From alpha mail to broadcasting mogul

Royal Mail rewarding Adam Crozier's 'failure'

Crozier's £100,000 pay rise... and his bonus is the same again

Adam on leave

Put paid to pay consultants

If there is one single force responsible for the regrettable soaring of boardroom pay over the past two decades, it is the insidious rise and rise of the remuneration consultant ...

Now no blue-chip company would dream of creating a chief executive’s pay packet without drafting in consultants, usually two or three different firms for different elements of the package ...

All burble on dutifully about the importance of aligning the long-term interests of shareholders with those of management.

All insist their complex systems of targets, benchmarks, hurdles and option formulae achieve this.

Yet long-run share returns have for years moved in precisely the opposite direction to top pay. Packages of £1 million, £2 million and £3 million are now common: the average FTSE 100 chief executive earns 128 times as much as his average employee; the ratio a decade ago was 47 times.

Meanwhile, long-run share returns have collapsed and are at their lowest for two decades.

Something isn’t working. The problem is that these consultants are usually hired — directly or indirectly — by the very people whose pay they are helping to set. The incentive to structure overgenerous schemes is obvious: that way you get hired again and also win mandates from other executives who would like to be similarly rewarded ...

Times  09 Jan 2010    

Bonus time as banks pay out £40bn

The world's biggest investment banks are expected to pay out more than $65bn (£40bn) in salaries and bonuses in the next two weeks, reinforcing the view that it is business as usual on Wall Street and in the City barely a year since the taxpayer bailout of the banking system.

Despite efforts by Alistair Darling to deter banks from handing out multi-million pound bonuses through the introduction of a 50% windfall tax, City sources believe that the biggest employers will absorb the cost of the tax rather than cut the size of the bonus pools they amass throughout the year.

This will mean that ... government will have failed to alter the traditional bonus culture in the City.

Lord Oakeshott, the Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesman, described the size of the potential bonuses as "global greed by banks when global governance has failed".

He added: "Britain's bonus tax only toys with the symptoms of the sickness, not its cause. These last few investment banks left standing have state-backed licences to print money so they must pay supertax on their superprofits, not hold taxpayers to ransom."

Guardian  08 Jan 2010

Goldman Sachs will ignite a storm of controversy in the new year when it reveals that its bankers are on course to collect pay and bonuses worth $19bn (£11.4bn), despite 2009 being the worst year for the US economy in 30 years.

The news comes as banks in Britain find themselves in the firing line after it emerged that 5,000 bankers stand to collect more than £1m each, sparking criticism from ministers who accused financiers of being out of touch as millions are thrown out of work amid recession.

City sources say that the pay and bonus pot at Goldman is based on projected figures from Thomson Financial, published on Friday, which show that the investment bank is expected to generate net income of around $45bn.

Analysts predict that 43% of that figure will be set aside for compensation to be distributed to the bank's 31,700 employees, 6,000 of whom are in London.

Remuneration as a proportion of net income is expected to be lower than the average of 46.7% in the 10 years to 2008, partly as a sop to US public opinion.

Brad Hintz, investment banking analyst at Sanford Bernstein, says: "Everyone inside the firm is aware there is more than enough money available to make everyone happy."

Goldman has enjoyed a bumper year thanks to booming debt markets, a recovery in the oil price and a rise in the value of equities since January, with some indices up by 20% ...

Observer  06 December 2009

Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein: "I'm Doing God's Work"

Public must learn to 'tolerate the inequality' of bonuses

Goldman Sachs exec defends bonuses

Rescued bank's traders scoop £1.8bn bonuses

Retention bonuses back at Merrills

Bankers bag £7.6bn in bonuses

Bank lending to businesses fell by £14.7bn

The banks' jackpot is no surprise

Bank profits and bonuses: a checklist

Big bonuses? It would be wrong to stop paying them'

Banks defend bonus culture as profits jump

Barclays is set to award its 22,000 investment bankers pay rises of up to 150pc in an effort to beat Government moves to clamp down on multi-million-pound bonuses ...

Barclays' decision to backdate the pay rise is likely to act as an effective cash bonus this year, as the bulk of performance pay will be made in stock and deferred for up to three years in accordance with the new guidelines.

Higher salaries and smaller bonuses are intrinsic to its new pay structure. Central to the policy will be an increase in the cap on salaries in BarCap from £120,000 to £300,000. The changes are likely to have the biggest effect on junior staff ...

Telegraph  03 December 2009

Bankers 'need to join real world'

RBS board may quit if £1.5bn bonus plan is vetoed

5,000 bankers to earn £1m this year

Executives at Britain's top companies saw their basic salaries leap 10% last year, despite the onset of the worst global recession in decades, in which their companies lost almost a third of their value amid a record decline in the FTSE ...

Bonus payouts were lower, but the basic salary hikes were more than three times the 3.1% average pay rise for ordinary workers in the private sector.

The big rise in directors' basic pay – more than double the rate of inflation last year – came as many of their companies were imposing pay freezes on staff and starting huge redundancy programmes to slash costs ...

The average chief executive of a blue-chip company now earns a basic salary of £791,000. However, adding bonus payments, share awards and the value of perks ranging from cars and drivers to school fees and dental work, the average pay package rises dramatically ...

Guardian  14 September 2009

Pay gap widens between executives and their staff

It was FTSE's worst year ever – but not for executive pay

Executive pay: Heads you win, tails you win

Executive pay 'up 10 per cent despite crash'

High earners grab £10bn in pension tax relief

Britain's biggest earners benefit from pension subsidies worth more than £10bn a year while shopfloor workers are suffering steep cuts in their retirement incomes, according to the TUC.

The top 1% of earners grab the lion's share of the £37bn set aside by the Treasury for tax relief on pension contributions to enhance their already generous retirement plans, the union body said ahead of its conference next week in Liverpool. ...

Barber said: "The real pension crisis is the growing number of workers in the private sector without any kind of pension, who are now paying almost £10bn a year to subsidise the pensions of the richest one per cent of the population.

"The employer-backed campaign against public sector pensions is right that there is an unfair division between the public and private sectors. But it is a strange idea of fairness to argue that because private sector staff have seen big cuts in their pensions, then so must the public sector ...

Tax relief on pension contributions of £37bn is heavily skewed towards the better off. Treasury figures show that 60% of tax relief goes to higher rate taxpayers, with 25% – nearly £10bn a year – going to the top 1% of earners ...

Guardian  09 September 2009

Pinochet's lost millions: the UK connection

The sustained cover-up of the Pinochet fortune – largely amassed through drugs and arms dealing, and Pinochet's making over of newly privatised state concerns to family members – took place in British colonies which were ultimately controlled by Whitehall.

They range from Gibraltar, the Caribbean tax havens of the Cayman Islands and the British Virgin Islands (BVI), to former colonies such as the Bahamas and Hong Kong.

With help from within the British finance industry, offshore bank accounts were set up at the same time as companies with names such as Abanda Finance, Althorp Investment Trust, Ashburton, Belview International, Sociedad de Inversiones Belview, Cornwall Overseas, Eastview Finance, GLP, and Tasker Investments.

The corrupt and chaotic state of some offshore tax havens was illustrated this month by Whitehall's decision to dismiss the local authorities and resume direct rule in the Turks and Caicos Islands ...

Much of General Pinochet's fortune was generated by his drugs and arms dealing and from privatisations encouraged by the International Monetary Fund and right-wing economists after he seized power in 1973.

Pinochet decreed these privatisations before any regulation was put in place over the new private monopolies. Consequently they were wildly profitable.

In chemicals and iodine the state-owned Soquimich company, with annual profits of $67m, was made over to Julio Ponce, then Pinochet's son-in-law.

The state insurance agency, ISE, was handed to Jorge Aravena, another son-in-law.

Paper mills, telephone companies and energy concerns were also given out to family members and hangers-on ...

Independent  23 August 2009

M&S risks shareholder rebellion with bonuses for falling short

The bonus scheme details for 2009-10 show that "11.25% of salary becomes payable" even when profits fall 10% short of City and internal expectations. If the retailer hits expectations, some 45% is payable. The maximum bonus – 250% of salary, which would deliver a £2.8m bonus to Rose on top of his £1.1m salary – will require directors to hit "additional 'stretch' targets".

Guardian 04 June 2009

Bosses' pay and WPP

2008 wasn't especially painful for a typical chief executive of a FTSE 100 company, according to a new independent survey by Manifest, the "governance" service that advises big investors.

It calculates that the median total remuneration for a FTSE 100 chief executive rose 7% last year to £2.6m ...

Robert Peston 02 June 2009

The art of avoiding the credit crunch

In July, the chairman of the now bankrupt Lehman Brothers, Richard Fuld and his wife Kathy consigned 20 works on paper - including a 1951 de Kooning drawing - to Christie's for sale.

Cleverly, they secured a guarantee on the works of about $20m. That means they make that sum of money as a minimum, whatever happens to the bidding when they go under the hammer in November.

Remarkable good fortune to have made the move before Lehman Brothers went under in September - indeed, before the banking crisis really kicked off.

Art market observer and author Sarah Thornton, speaking at a literary event at the Southbank Centre in London last week, was the relayer of this interesting piece of information.

Guardian 29 October 2008   Lehman Brothers

Tony Blair earns £12m since leaving Downing Street

The former Prime Minister travels around the world on speaking engagements, and can command up to $250,000 (£157,000) for a 90 minute speech. He works exclusively through the blue-chip Washington Speakers Bureau.

Mr Blair has made £4.6 million from his memoirs, around £2 million from his role with investment bank JP Morgan, £500,000 from Zurich Financial Services asw ell as £84,000 of taxpayers money to run a private office and an annual pension of £63,468.

He has earned more money from speeches than Bill Clinton, the former US president, did in his first year after leaving office, The Times reported.

The paper said there is fear at the United Nations that Mr Blair's focus on commercial interests is jeopardising his unpaif role as Middle East envoy.

Such is the demand for Mr Blair, that he has a two-year waiting list for bookings, with clients prepared to pay $250,000 (£157,000) for a typical speech of roughly 90 minutes.

"He is one of the biggest stars in the world. Who else is there?" said Max Markson, the public relations organiser who has taken Mr Clinton, Cherie Blair and Nelson Mandela to Australia ...

Telegraph 29 October 2008   

Rich Pickings

The American poet Ogden Nash said bankers were just like everyone else - but richer.

Nowhere is that more true than in Mayfair, home to London's mysterious and lucrative hedge funds.

As financial Armageddon is visited upon City institutions, the brash new hedges are where the wedge is.

One fund manager is awaiting completion of an order for 50 bespoke suits, costing between £3,000 and £4,500 each.

Too busy to pick out his own fabrics, he asked his tailor to choose them for him.

Why so many? He has several homes in the UK and abroad and wants to have a complete business wardrobe in each so he doesn't have to travel with luggage.

As partners Dougie Davis and Craig Pogson of Mayfair's smartest tailor Pogson and Davis said: 'Our clients are above bonuses.' ...

Mail on Sunday 21 September 2008    Share sharks made £190m

European anger at 'scourge' of Anglo-American pay practices

The "social scourge" of excessive boardroom pay has prompted widespread debate in the European Union as workers see their purchasing power eroded by rising prices and low wage increases. European political leaders have demanded a legal and fiscal clampdown. ...

Even before Pat Russo, chief executive of serially loss-making IT firm Alcatel-Lucent, quit in late July with a contractual pay-off of up to €6m (£4.8m), French president Nicolas Sarkozy had produced draft laws to curb such "golden parachutes".

The Dutch government has introduced legislation for a 30% tax on bonuses of more than €500,000 and a 15% increase in employer's fiscal contributions to executive pensions, partly influenced by the multimillion pay-off for ABN Amro chief Rijkman Groenink. In Germany, where workers' pay rose only 4.3% between 2003 and 2007 as firms laid off hundreds of thousands of employees, Social Democrats are demanding a €1m ceiling on tax-deductible boardroom remuneration. ...

The growing evidence is that mainland European companies are following the lead of their British counterparts by setting executive remuneration packages, including stock options, at a level commensurate with global - not national - peers in an effort to retain and incentivise directors. ...

Guardian 13 September 2008   

A comfortable retirement awaits - pipe, slippers and a million a year

Royal Bank of Scotland's generosity towards its longstanding US boss, Lawrence Fish, has given him entry into an elite club of executives with annual retirement incomes in excess of £1m.

Fish, who will retire next year from his non-executive role as chairman of RBS's Citizens Bank, accrued a pension worth £1,036,218 and tops the Guardian's survey of directors' pensions. He joins BP's Lord Browne, who saw his pension entitlement break the £1m mark in last year's survey.

Cadbury Schweppes boss Todd Stitzer can look forward to a minimum annual pension of £882,000, while Jeroen van der Veer, the chief executive of Shell, has built up an entitlement of £828,923 a year.

The survey calculates pension accrued up to the beginning of this year.

Van der Veer, who is 61, retires next summer, but Stitzer, at 56, has some time to add to his pension. Like most executives, both benefit from gold-plated schemes that guarantee to pay two-thirds of their final salary when they retire. ...

Guardian 12 September 2008   Executive Salaries

Top bosses' pensions escape the squeeze

The soaring cost of providing a guaranteed retirement income failed to deter Britain's biggest companies from handing out bumper pension contributions last year to their senior executives, according to research by the TUC.

The average pension of directors in Britain's top 100 companies was more than £200,000 in 2007, when the average for workers was just over £8,000. Directors were handed higher pension contributions than in the previous year and higher retirement payouts, especially when they were linked to their final salary.

A study of 346 company directors showed they had amassed pension pots averaging £3m each, with some having more than £5m, paying out an annual sum of £333,000. Gold-plated final-salary pensions remained the most popular way of paying executives a retirement income, according to the annual PensionsWatch survey, despite most companies declaring they were unaffordable for workers. ...

The report found that directors also benefited from rules allowing them to accumulate their pension rights in half the time it takes a worker, and retire at 60 when the majority of workers must wait until 65. ...

The average employer contribution to directors in DC pension schemes was £91,734, up from £86,000 in 2006. ...

Wealth Log 02 September 2008   More ...

'Curious' bank balance sheet: profits lost, £13bn; bosses' jobs lost, zero

More than £13bn has been wiped off the profits of the UK's major banks in the year since the credit crunch began. But, in contrast to the US, none of their executives have paid the price. As the half-yearly bank reporting season drew to a close yesterday with the historic loss reported by Royal Bank of Scotland, the havoc inflicted on the banks was illustrated by the dramatic fall in profits. On the anniversary of the day the credit crunch began with a $150bn (£75bn) injection of funds into the global markets by the European Central Bank and the Federal Reserve, banks are no longer defending high profits from irate customers but apologising to shareholders for poor performance.

Guardian  09 August 2008   Credit Crunch Log

Governor warns 'innocent bystanders' will lose homes

Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of England, today launched an attack on excessive risk taking by banks and financial institutions and gave warning that "when the party ends, some innocent bystanders may lose their homes altogether." Speaking at the British Bankers' Association annual conference, Mr King also said that if banks were convinced they would be bailed out by the Bank of England if they failed, "then over time the parties will become wilder and wilder." Mr King said a range of financial institutions such as investment banks, monoline insurers and hedge funds had the "potential to cause significant damage to the economy in the wake of their demise." This attitude among banks had damaged consumers, he said, adding: "When the party ends, some innocent bystanders may lose their homes altogether." ...

The Times  10 June 2008    House sales at 30-year low

Loan protection policies 'are £1.4bn con'

Banks are overcharging customers by £1.4bn a year for loan protection policies that many will be unable to claim on, the Competition Commission has ruled.

In a damning report into personal protection insurance (PPI) policies the commission found that banks were ripping off borrowers who wish to protect themselves from losing their job or falling ill. ...

Taking out PPI can add £3,000 to a £7,500 loan. But many policy-holders have found that they cannot make a claim because they have a medical condition or are self-employed. Those who do claim find payments usually last 12 months or less. ...

Independent 06 June 2008   'Financialisation'

City bonuses defy credit crunch and hit new record of £13bn

A Telegraph analysis of government figures shows how bonuses for City workers and other financial services professionals have continued to soar, exceeding previous records by more than £500 million.

The recent annual awards were mostly triggered by large profits made early in 2007, before the credit crunch hit, but will fuel a growing row over whether bankers are encouraged to take excessive risks with investors' money.

The £12.6 billion sum would almost match the £15 billion hole that has emerged in the accounts of British banks as much of their profitability proved temporary ...

Telegraph  25 May 2008

"Greed really has become a part of America’s value system.

"Get as much as you can, while you can, and don’t worry about the other guy.

"Corporate greed often exploits the poor for greater profits.

"Political greed makes promises never meant to be kept in order to achieve position.

"Personal greed sets us free from a sense of responsibility to the community, and establishes love of self as the greatest commandment."

Joe Thorn.net

... Josef Fritzl represents merely the most extreme form of a very common philosophy of life: I will do what makes me happy, and if that causes others to suffer, hard luck ...

Diocese of Lichfield  30 May 2008