New disclosure rules have forced the bank to publish a raft of details on pay and incentives

IF BARCLAYS chief executive Bob Diamond – or “Diamond Bob” as he’s increasingly known – thought he could impress us all by turning down a few million pounds in bonus payments, he was very much mistaken.

After weeks of refusing to say what his bonus would be, or whether he would take it at all, Diamond’s performance windfall was finally revealed at £6.5 million (€7.6 million), rather than the £9.5 million (€11 million) he could have collected.

The remuneration report confirmed Diamond’s position as Britain’s best-paid banking chief executive with £6.75 million last year (including his base salary of £250,000) but this was just the tip of the iceberg, for Diamond and for Barclays.

New disclosure rules have forced the bank to publish a raft of additional details on pay and incentives – and the result is a remuneration report with greed ingrained in every table of figures and every footnote.

Reading the report, which reveals that a group of 231 of Barclays’ “key risk takers” shared a colossal £554 million (€645 million) between them, you begin to wonder if it’s a spoof: is there really a banker called Rich Ricci? But of course there is; he’s co-head of Barclays Capital (Diamond’s old job) and he was awarded £44 million (€51 million) last year. Then there’s Jerry del Missier, the other BarCap co-head, who takes top spot as the highest-paid senior executive with almost £50 million (€58 million) in pay, bonuses, long-term incentives and share sales last year. (Ricci and del Missier are referred to in the report as “Individual 1” and “Individual 2” as the bank is not obliged to name them – but it didn’t take long for the financial press to work it out.)

Diamond Bob’s rewards begin to look paltry in comparison, but anyone who imagined the Barclays chief would have to get by on a mere £6.75 million is clearly not living in the real world. Add to that figure £6.75 million in long-term incentives and £13.8 million of share sales and the total climbs to more than £27 million (€31 million).

And let’s not forget the old guard – former chief executive John Varley, Diamond’s predecessor, was awarded a £2.2 million (€2.6 million) bonus on top of his £1.65 million (€1.9 million) salary, more than tripling his total package. His pension pot was revealed to be worth £18 million (€21 million).

There were some figures missing from the report – the banks are only obliged to publish the remuneration of employees with managerial responsibilities, which excludes traders at BarCap.

It is quite possible that the rewards given to one or more of the bank’s top traders equalled or even exceeded packages in the boardroom. But we’ll never know.

Sir Richard Broadbent, head of Barclays’ remuneration committee, insisted the bank had shown “responsibility in pay” but, understandably, MPs and union leaders branded the pay deals obscene – and there were murmurings of discontent from shareholders as the report includes this little gem of information: £100 invested in Barclays shares in 2005 is worth £53 today while the same sum put into the FTSE 100 index is worth £126.

Fiona Walsh writes for the Guardiannewspaper in London