Banking Bill

That is not in my amendment, because my amendment relates to rescued banks. However, we have still given money and support to those banks because they would have failed if there had not been some Government support, in other ways, through the Bank of England. I think that the measure should apply to other speculative financial vehicles such as hedge funds, but that is not in my amendment. It is quite wrong that their directors take vast sums in remuneration and bonuses, again for reckless policies, and walk away when they go broke. The FSA has a regulatory role to play, so what is it doing about that? I have looked at the past few months' issues of the Labour Research Department's Fact Service for examples of City bankers' bonuses. If I had gone back a year, there would have been scores of them, but even in the past few months there have been some. A report on ““City fat cats”” in the 14 August issue said:"““The credit crunch does not seem to have affected the big hitters in the City all that much. The table across shows the ""highest paid directors at 29 companies, who were each on over £1 million a year. The total pay bill for the 29 comes to a staggering £195.8 million—an average pay packet of £6.8 million.””" According to the table, one director at Barclays got £18,100,000, and someone at Barclays Global Investors got £1,102,000. A director at Goldman Sachs got £11,738,000, and someone at Citigroup, which has just been rescued by the US, got £2,426,000. At the top of the table, a director at Sloane Robinson LLP got a massive £51,411,000, and someone at Odey Asset Management got £27,937,000. One more that I have marked up is the £2,091,000 that went to a director at Financial Risk Management, which took great financial risks—we all know that—but it lost, so I do not think that sum is appropriate. An article entitled, ““Directors' pay ratchets ever upwards””, in the 18 September issue of Fact Service said:"““Directors who served on the boards of the top-ranked FTSE 100 companies earned a combined package of £979.2 million last year. Their total salary packages grew by 5 per cent. compared with the previous year, according to the latest survey on executive pay by the Guardian newspaper and Reward Technology Forum. Four of the top 10 highest earners work in the banking or the financial services sector””." It went on:"““Barclays president Bob Diamond made a little over £18 million, though he collected another £14 million from a three-year performance plan shortly after the financial year end.””" Some performance!