The City’s five biggest banker bonuses since 2006

theguardian.com:

As the chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, considers scrapping the bankers’ bonus cap, we look back at some of the largest City paydays of recent decades.

2006: Royal Bank of Scotland’s Fred Goodwin is paid £4m

Months before Royal Bank of Scotland was rescued in a £45bn taxpayer-funded bailout in 2008, the bank revealed that it had paid its chief executive Fred “the Shred” Goodwin £4m in 2006.

That was up 38% from a year earlier, and included a £1.2m salary and a bonus of £3.8m. Goodwin later ran into controversy after it emerged that he was granted a £16.9m pension pot that paid out nearly £700,00 a year.

The same year, RBS’s finance director Guy Whittaker took home £4.5m – the bulk of which was a share and cash payment that compensated him for bonuses he would have received at his former employer, Citigroup.

2011: Barclays’s Bob Diamond is paid £11m

Former investment banker turned chief executive Bob Diamond sparked controversy after he received abumper pay packet worth £11m in 2011.

He had been granted a £1.35m salary, but also received a £2.7m share bonus, as well as £474,000 worth of perks including personal financial advice and chauffeurs. That was on top of share payouts and deferred payments pre-dating the financial crisis.

Diamond – who only led the bank for a year – was ousted as a result of the Libor rigging scandal. Barclays was the first bank to settle with the authorities over the controversy, paying £290m in 2012.

2011: HSBC’s Stuart Gulliver is paid £7.2m

The ex-chief executive of HSBC took home £7.2m in 2011, a year when he was allowed to earn three times his £1.25m salary as an annual bonus, and six times that total as part of a long-term incentive plan, which covered a three-year period.

He could have been paid a maximum