Ask whoever appointed him to the job..................... I think he's an MP in Scotland............... writing his memoirs on how he screwed a country into bankruptcy while being a Pm.............
Hasn't his bonus been paid in the form of shares? I saw that this guy was the one they brought in to sort the bank out after they got into bother last time and his bonus is a reward for helping RBS to recover. I'm not saying it right or anything, personally I think its well over the top
Of course we all think it's OTT. It's a bit like a lottery win to most of us mortals. However, to these bankers, who still see themselves as masters of the universe that's the value of the work they do. It's 'small fry' compared to what these guys used to get back in 'the old days'. Compare his job to other FTSE100 CEO's and compare his salary and bonus. I'm not supporting it, and probably if I was in his position I might consider taking the bonus (on principle) then giving to charity. This is a sign of the times and an indication of our social acceptance that those who serve society best must accept the worst appreciation. Those who do nothing to support our society, such as footballers get obscene amounts of money yet no-one kicks off about that. Rant over.
I think the problem people have Peter is that when ordinary mortals get a bonus, it is a fraction of their salary, but when these CEO's get a bonus it's often a multiple of their salary and it's often not obvious what the reward is actually for When it appears to reward failure then folk get upset. Personally it does not bother me that much, there are many professions where the rewards sometimes look unfair including mine I might add. I had a good friend, software developer like me, a solid guy but not an outstanding developer who got into the right contract at the right time and was earning in excess of 1200 quid a day over a 20 month contract back at the start of the last decade. Now is any Visual Basic/Javascript developer worth that much? No, but that was the market rate at the time for his specific combination of skills. While I never got quite that lucky myself I did charge pretty high daily rates for my services in the past, nowadays my employer would charge me out at 4 times what he pays me if I ever got allowed to do anything useful and we charge some of our training lads out at 8 times what we pay them, but that is the economics of the particular business I am in and the company is just small and does not make ridiculous profits. Regards the footballers I couldn't agree more
Having now read the Beeb article a reply for Rob might be this :- RBS turned me down for a 10,000 pound loan in 1986 to buy the flat I had lived in since I was born, both my parents had died by the time I was 27, I have never been good with money but it upset me that they would not let me buy that place as the valuation at the time was over 20 grand and my salary was not that bad. At that time they were applying the old fashioned sensible banking rules that had worked for hundreds of years and back then bank managers, while not skint, were not paid mega money. They were probably right to refuse me at that time but it hurt. How exactly they got into the mess they did god alone knows, but in the process one of my friends lost nearly 200 grand, he put his money in just days before the bank's share price collapsed, he was foolish to make such a large single investment yes but such is life. Apparently the taxpayer owns 82 percent of RBS, really hard to imagine what would have happened if the government had just let it collapse. The LLoyds - Bank of Scotland/Halifax deal was another matter, that was just hubris and simply dumb, take a good bank and screw it up completely
