Lloyds 'paid £1m to more than 20 staff'
Lloyds Banking Group is expected to reveal this week that it paid more than 20 of its staff £1m or more last year.
The figure, which will be disclosed in the taxpayer-backed lender’s annual report, means there were around 770 bankers in this pay bracket at the five big high street firms last year, the Sunday Times said.
Lloyds is predominately a retail bank with most of its million-pound bankers working in its small wholesale banking division, which has to compete for staff with big international investment banks.
Chief executive Antonio Horta-Osorio was paid £2.5m last year and is due to have details of a new long-term bonus scheme disclosed in the report.
Barclays has already revealed that it paid 428 staff more than £1m last year, while there were 95 at Royal Bank of Scotland, 204 at HSBC and 19 at Santander.
The disclosures on millionaires club pay have emerged because of new guidelines enforced by Vince Cable’s business department.
Lloyds remained in the red last year with £570m of losses in 2012 after taking more mammoth provisions relating to mis-sold payment protection insurance.
Staff shared a £365m total bonus pot but one of the conditions for Mr Horta-Osorio’s payout is that the Government must have sold at least a third of its stake above 61p – the average price at which shares were bought during the bank’s bailout in 2008.
The controversy on bank pay reignited last week when it emerged that Rich Ricci, the investment banking chief at Barclays, sold £17.6m worth of shares that were awarded in bonuses deferred from previous years. The bank’s regulatory disclosure was made on the day of the Budget.
Barclays said the payments were historic and that future bonus payments would be much lower.
The European Union has agreed a pay cap that would restrict bonus payments to one times annual salary, or twice the salary with shareholders’ approval. Banks fear this will force them to raise base salaries and make them uncompetitive against American and Asian firms.
