Senior staff at Royal Bank of Scotland sparked the biggest one-day sale of the bank’s shares since its government bail-out, as they disposed of £140m of stock issued as part of their bonuses. Of the 650m shares awarded to employees on Monday for their performance in 2009, more than half were immediately sold into the market. [FT]
RBS
In February 2010, RBS employee Jim Glover (AKA G-Love) was told that his services were no longer required by the firm, when it came to light he’d spent that last year or so instructing junior employees to submit wires that would normally go to a counterparty to pay for trades, and then approving them to, instead, go to his personal account. The Glove Love did so, it’s been suggested, because he wasn’t happy with what he believed to be an offensively paltry bonus that wasn’t sufficient enough to fund his dream: “to build beautiful luxury mountain homes in his favorite ski town, Windham, N.Y.” Now that Glover has pleaded guilty and faces a fine of up to $1.25 million (plus ten years in jail), his own dream house has been put on the block and it could conceivably be yours a ten-spot, as the auction requires no minimum bid. According to the listing: Read more »
A senior staffer, allegedly, which he preferred no one know about. Making this slightly awkward. Read more »
Looking ahead to next year’s bonus already? No? Well management at the Royalest bank at Scotland is and they’d like everyone to start managing their expectations now- count yourself lucky if they continue letting you into the building. Read more »
A profit is nearly within reach. Read more »
RBS Chief Stephen Hester May Not Have Been Briefed On Fellow CEOs Bonuses When He Defended His £7.7M One By Saying It Was “At The Low End Of Comparable Jobs”
By Bess Levin
RBS CEO Stephen Hester was recently asked by Parliament to defend his bonus for 2011, which clocked in at around £7.7m. Some might argue the Brits had the right to do so in light of the fact that about 82 percent of the bank is owned by the government. The two sides brought slightly different opinions to the table, Hester being of the mind that the his paycheck was well-deserved, and the MP’s being in strong disagreement, given that RBS recently reported net losses for a third consecutive year.
Things got quite heated, with Labour MP Austin Mitchell asking, “What have you done for £7.7m? Is it that you produced an outstanding enormous profit for the bank, or is it because you are a greedy banker?” Hester, taking umbrage at the suggestion that a) he didn’t earn every pound of his package and that b) he was in anyway greedy sought fit to lay some truth on Mitchell and Co’s asses, telling them his number was “at the low end of comparable jobs in the UK and globally.” An interesting theory! Read more »
Remember Fred Goodwin? He was the CEO of RBS for a number of years (about 8) and for many of them, probably right liked being called a ‘banker.’ Like in 2000, when he was name Chief executive and in 2006, when he was voted the most powerful businessman in Scotland. Years from now he’ll look back on his tenure fondly but at this moment, he’s having some difficulty recalling all the good times, in light of how badly things ended, and the fact that people won’t stop making him feel guilty for putting the pieces in place the caused RBS to lose a spectacular amount of money and wind up with 82% of its ass owned by the government.
Goodwin’s been trying his hardest to move on and maybe even embark on a new career as a party planner but what’s making it so hard is that every time he opens a newspaper, he sees his name next to the word ‘banker.’ Refraining from reading papers doesn’t help either because of course you’ve got the internet and you can’t expect him to not have a Google alert set up for himself, now can you? Anyway, Goodwin tried to reason with the press and just get them to drop the ‘banker’ business altogether or at least swap it out for a better description like ‘genius’ or ‘piece of ass’ but they wouldn’t listen, so what Goodwin had to do was play hardball. Read more »
Remember the financial crisis? U.K. bank regulators do and what’s most memorable to them is just how badly their firms fucked that shit up. RBS, seriously? SERIOUSLY? And the rest of you weren’t much better. It’s something that keeps the FSA up at night and to be honest, confidence in your abilities to respond to another serious “situation” has not been restored. In fact, if we’re being completely open, RBS, Bank of Ireland, Allied Irish Banks, all you guys right now are like a stoner who nearly burnt down the house because you absentmindedly left the stove on when you tried to make pot brownies and then wandered out of the room to look out cloud formations. If that wasn’t bad enough, you didn’t smell the smoke or see the flames and it was your neighbor who had to call the fire department and carry you outside. There’s no way anyone’s comfortable leaving you home alone again for the foreseeable future and you have them so freaked out they’ve been forced to treat you like imbeciles and make you go through a bunch of mock scenarios to see if you’d know how to react.
U.K. bank regulators are launching a new type of “stress test” that forces banks to consider unlikely but potentially disastrous scenarios…The latest exercise, which the U.K.’s Financial Services Authority instructed banks to start conducting in mid-December, is dubbed a “reverse stress test.” It requires banks to identify potentially fatal events and then to work backward to find ways to revamp their businesses so they would be better prepared to withstand such shocks.
So far those scenarios include what to do in the event of: a Latin American coup that knocks out a bank’s local operations; a disrupted food supply sparks social chaos; a major trade war erupts between the US and China; volcanic ash cloud grounds UK air traffic for months; and a flu pandemic wipes out a bank’s workforce. Read more »
Yes, bonuses at RBS are expected to be “downsized” at least thirty percent this year but the relatively good news? The bank will get to pay out shitty bonuses on its own terms and not because anyone is forcing them to do so. Read more »
Bob Diamond Will Not Be Limiting Bonuses For Barclays Staff This Year, Would Appreciate It If The Bank Bashers Would Piss Off, Buy A Clue
By Bess Levin
Earlier this morning across the pond, Bob Diamond told the House of Commons Treasury Committee that while payouts will be distributed “responsibly,” Barclays employees will be awarded bonuses that reflect the work they’ve done this year and will not be dictated by some arbitrary cap. Why won’t BD listen to the repeated calls from the government and the people to limit pay? Because to do so would in essence be saying “sorry, we were wrong,” and guess what, Bub? The days when Barclays would get down on its hands and knees and beg for forgiveness from the masses are over. “There was a period of remorse and apology for banks,” Bobby said. “I think that period needs to be over.” And while we’re on the subject? Remind Bob again why exactly an institution like Barclays should even be apologizing for in the first place? It’s just not exactly clear to him given that you seem to have two types of banks in the UK- the kind like Barclays, which did nothing wrong and the kind like RBS, which can’t do anything right. And yet, they’re treated one and the same. Read more »
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