Bye Bye Bonus, hello pay rise
Banks, apparently, are not waiting for new legislation to curb bonuses. While I was at BusinessDesk’s birthday party in Leeds last week, I was told by a reliable source that state-controlled Royal Bank of Scotland was already discreetly doubling the salaries of those bankers it was most keen to retain.
Following my post on November 16, it should come as no surprise to anyone that banks are looking at ways to continue paying huge rewards to their star players. But it should be left to shareholders – not governments – to determine (or at least endorse) what those rewards should be. In the case of RBS, of course, we are the shareholders, so one wonders what Alistair Darling is doing about Royal Bank’s new remneration policy, or whether he even knows about it. I suspect the answers to these questions are, respectively, nothing and no.
