bonuses

  • 25 Sep 2012 at 11:51 AM

Bonus Watch ’12: Barclays Employees To Get Paid (Or Not) For Being ‘Good Citizens’

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Breaking the speed limit in a school zone, for example, will cost you a couple mill, while volunteering with your local Boy Scouts chapter to help the troops earn their “Libor Manipulation” badges will translate to a few extra zeros on payday. Read more »

  • 11 Sep 2012 at 11:46 AM

UBS Whistleblower’s $104 Million Award Poses Interesting Conundrum For Would-Be Snitches

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Remember Bradley Birkenfeld? He’s the guy who single-handedly made the government’s case against UBS and forced the Swiss bank to hand over the names of thousands of tax cheats, which resulted in the US scoring $780 million from UBS and may have inspired some 33,000 Americans to “voluntarily disclose offshore accounts to the IRS, generating more than $5 billion.” And yet, despite his assistance, Birkenfeld wasn’t immediately thanked for a job well done. Instead, he was sentenced to forty months in prison (fair-ish, considering he showed a few clients how to avoid paying taxes himself) and told to piss off by the Internal Revenue Service, from whom he sought an award, because he was “not forthcoming about his own role in the scheme,” even as a Justice Department attorney admitted that “…without Mr. Birkenfeld walking into the door of the Department of Justice in the summer of 2007, I doubt as of today that this massive fraud would have been discovered by the US government” (or as his lawyer put it, “They didn’t know how to spell UBS until he showed up. He didn’t just give them a piece of the puzzle. He gave them the entire puzzle”). Now, after doing 32 months at Schuylkill Federal Correctional Institution, getting let out early on account of “good-time credit,” and living in a halfway house in New Hampshire, Birkenfeld has finally been thrown a bone. Read more »

  • 28 Aug 2012 at 11:33 AM

Deferring ‘Significant’ Amounts Of Compensation, Placing Caps On Bonuses Not Working Out So Well For Barclays

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Only in that senior people the bank worked hard to recruit are quitting en masse. Otherwise, it’s great. Read more »

  • 21 Aug 2012 at 4:49 PM

Bonus Watch ’12: SEC Whistleblowers

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A whistleblower who helped the Securities and Exchange Commission stop a multi-million dollar fraud will receive nearly $50,000 — the first payout from a new SEC program to reward people who provide evidence of securities fraud. The award represents 30 percent of the amount collected in an SEC enforcement action against the perpetrators of the scheme, the maximum percentage payout allowed by the whistleblower law. “The whistleblower program is already becoming a success,” said SEC Chairman Mary L. Schapiro, who advocated for the program. “We’re seeing high-quality tips that are saving our investigators substantial time and resources.” [SEC]

  • 20 Aug 2012 at 3:46 PM

Bonus Watch ’12: Moelis

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First year numbers. Read more »

  • 09 Aug 2012 at 1:41 PM

Bonus Watch ’12: UBS

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Numbers for first and second year analysts (who are not happy). Read more »

  • 02 Aug 2012 at 2:53 PM

Bonus Watch ’12: Wells Fargo Securites

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Numbers for first, second, and third year analysts. Read more »

  • 31 Jul 2012 at 3:03 PM

Bonus/Layoffs Watch ’12: Barclays

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The juniorest of mistmakers have received their numbers (and a little perspective). Read more »

  • 31 Jul 2012 at 1:11 PM

Convicted Insider Trader Matthew Kluger “Shocked” To Find Out He Couldn’t Trust The Guys With Whom He Was Committing Federal Crimes

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Remember Matthew Kluger? To recap, he’s the mergers and acquisitions lawyer who spent two decades feeding inside information to convicted insider trader Garrett Bauer, that he picked up from partners at the six different law firms he worked at over the years. The operation, which included Kenneth Robinson, an old friend of Kluger who acted as the tips mule between MK and GB, went very smoothly for a very long time (17 years), and would have continued going smoothly had Robinson stuck with the plan instead of deciding to start making the same trades as Bauer, raising suspicion with SEC, which was watching the men and used “relationship analysis” to determine they were “part of the same trading scheme and had a common source: Kluger.” In March 2011, federal agents showed up to Robinson’s house and after thinking it over for a couple days, he decided to cooperate by giving prosecutors a step-by-step guide to how the scam operated, telling them Kluger’s name, and recording conversations with Kluger and Bauer in which the two said things like “I went right up to my apartment and I broke the phone in half and went to McDonald’s and put it in two different garbage cans” and “I can’t sleep. I can’t sleep. I’m waiting for the FBI to ride into my apartment” and “We have to get all the fingerprints off that money. Like you wearing gloves or something and wiping every bill down or something” and “There is no way [these cell phone conversations] could ever be recorded.”

Robinson was ultimately sentenced to 27 months in prison, Bauer got nine years (despite his 147 speeches about how insider trading is a bad idea on the college lecture), and Kluger was handed 12 years, beating Raj Rajaratnam for “the longest insider trading U.S. history.”

Recently, Kluger sat down with Bloomberg to offer a few more specifics re: how the scheme went down (“Sometimes it was a deal I was working on, sometimes it was a deal I heard being discussed in the office”; “I would call Ken and say ‘X/Y/Z company is considering a takeover of Q company”) but what he really wants to talk about? What was the biggest surprise and hardest punch to the gut in all of this? Is what it was like finding out that his buddies were stiffing him on cuts of their ill-gotten gains. Read more »

  • 30 Jul 2012 at 4:55 PM

Bonus Watch ’12: JPMorgan

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Li’l Dimons started receiving numbers today. Read more »