Goldman Sachs' bankers get £270,000 pay and bonuses

12 April 2012

Goldman Sachs has defied public outrage over bankers' pay by rewarding its staff with an average salary and bonus package of almost £270,000.

The total is more than 10 times the average UK wage and comes as David Cameron faces huge political pressure to rein in bonuses to the highly paid financiers blamed for causing the global recession.

The Wall Street giant revealed that it handed out a total of $15.38billion (£9.6billion) in pay, perks and year-end bonuses to its 35,700 staff - 5,000 in London.

The pot is five per cent down on 2009 but comes in a much tougher year for the bank, when profits fell 38 per cent to $8.35 billion.

Despite the small decline in pay, the vast Goldman Sachs payout will underline the impotence of government on both sides of the Atlantic to control "unacceptable" bankers' bonuses. TUC general secretary Brendan Barber said: "Goldman Sachs has stuck two fingers up to austerity Britain by shelling out mega bonuses again.

"These earnings would make Gordon Gekko blush. The Chancellor must use the upcoming G20 meeting and budget to make good the Coalition agreement to tackle unacceptable bonuses."

Goldman also revealed it paid a total of $465 million in banker bonus tax to the Treasury last year.

As the rate on the tax was 50 per cent, this suggests the total pot just for year-end bonuses, and not including base pay, was around $930 million. This is equivalent to $186,000 per head, or £117,000.

Goldman's peak year for pay and bonuses was 2007, when the average reward for its global workforce reached $661,490.

Last year, to head off criticism, it made the rare move of pulling money out of the staff bonus pool.

The world's most powerful investment bank has been struggling to restore its reputation since the start of the credit crunch, caused by huge bonuses and fraud charges laid against it last year.

It was memorably described as "a giant vampire squid, wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money" in Rolling Stone.

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