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

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