was this the one??
Making the bankers pay would be a REAL bonusRoyal Bank of Scotland boss Stephen Hester’s £780,000 bonus is surely an insult to all of us. We own 81 per cent of the shares, and had to pay a £390 million fine for the bank’s global interest-rate rigging.
A justification I heard yesterday was that Hester hadn’t had enough bonuses.
‘Stephen has had only one bonus out of four years, which we think is already quite a severe level of clawback through a different route,’ explained RBS chairman Sir Philip Hampton to the Sunday Times.
Clawback is the term — American in origin — which describes a government, or firm, demanding the return of money which has been dished out wrongly. For instance, huge commissions and bonuses paid for deals which turned out to be duds, losing billions for investors.
The way bankers think is this: they deserve their bonuses, and if they don’t get them, that’s a form of clawback.
How about some real clawback? RBS is reportedly ‘asking’ former directors to return the bonuses they ‘earned’ while the Libor (the rate at which banks lend to one another) was being rigged, and payment protection insurance mis-sold. So far, we are told no one has agreed to pay back their ill-gotten gains.
Hester’s bonus is for 2010, when the Libor rigging was going on.
‘It is wholly unacceptable that Hester should receive a bonus for 2010 when these scandals were still going on,’ says Lib Dem peer Lord Oakeshott.
The rigging itself was a ploy to boost their bonuses.
Banks are like the NHS. No one takes responsibility for bad practice and the taxpayer picks up the bill. They’re like our national health provider in another sense: governments are frightened of them.
Most of us don’t get bonuses, or share options, no matter how well we perform. Most of us are paid a fraction of the £1.2 million Hester receives. Nor do we work for companies which recklessly lent money deposited by us and had to be bailed out by the Treasury.
Yet bankers, politicians and the business world generally hailed Hester as something just short of a saint for agreeing to take over RBS when his spivvy predecessor, Fred Goodwin, retired to enjoy his enormous personal wealth and pension plan.
It was said that a knighthood — or a peerage — would be offered once his work was done to mark the gratitude of the nation.
Does Hester need a £780,000 bonus? Of course not. He’s already a wealthy man, sitting on a pot of shares due to mature in May and worth £2 million.
He seems to be receiving the bonus partly to justify the continuation of such payments in the banking community, whatever the performance of the banks.
‘We are not contemplating, for the avoidance of doubt, clawing back Stephen’s bonus award that was made in 2010,’ says Hampton.
Being owned 81 per cent by the taxpayer doesn’t appear to affect those in charge at RBS. The Government might not have encouraged this view, but Chancellor George Osborne has said nothing I am aware of to suggest otherwise.
Where can we turn for help? How about the new, Canadian-born Governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney? Surely, he could get the message across — that it’s just not on for bankers underpinned by the state to ladle out bonuses to themselves.
Carney faced MPs last week and justified his £800,000 salary plus £250,000 housing allowance by saying his package was ‘the equivalent’ of that enjoyed by outgoing governor Mervyn King.
He didn’t sound like a chap to oppose the remuneration of other bankers. His background as a former Goldman Sachs executive isn’t encouraging either.
How were they described again? ‘Like a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money,’ said Rolling Stone magazine.
Read more:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/artic ... z2KhAtphbL
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gutless pathectic retard's especially the EX Services shyttte 
Maybe he likes it by the jugfull 
