Barclays Plc docked its 2022 bonus pool by about £500 million ($604 million) over a pair of scandals, with staffers involved in the blunders feeling the brunt of the cuts.
(Bloomberg) — Barclays Plc docked its 2022 bonus pool by about £500 million ($604 million) over a pair of scandals, with staffers involved in the blunders feeling the brunt of the cuts.
The group incentive pool for the year was £1.79 billion, down about 8% on the previous year’s £1.945 billion as the investment bank drew regulatory fines last year for mistakenly overselling US investment products as well as staff’s use of private messaging services like WhatsApp.
The lender’s internal investigation could still result in further bonus cuts for those it finds responsible, according to the bank’s annual report. The British bank’s board also sought to reward employees who escalated the matter tied to the over-issuance of securities, the filing said.
“As that review is ongoing, unvested variable remuneration of relevant persons will be suspended as required to allow the review to run its course,” Barclays said in the report. Barclays estimated its total loss from the clerical error at £751 million in a second-quarter results presentation in July.
Top executives including Chief Executive Officer C.S. Venkatakrishnan and Finance Director Anna Cross also had their bonuses cut over the scandals. Venkatakrishnan, who has been undergoing treatment for cancer, saw his bonus cut by £403,000, according to the report.
“While our performance in 2022 was very gratifying, overall it was marred by the overissuance of securities in the US,” Venkatakrishnan said in a pre-recorded message for journalists on Wednesday. “I’m determined that incidents like this should not happen again.”
Barclays was among the dozen global banks that reached settlements with the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission last year to resolve probes into their failures to monitor employees’ communications on apps like WhatsApp.
–With assistance from Harry Wilson.
(Adds background on regulatory penalties in final paragraph. A previous version of the story corrected size of overall bonus pool in fifth paragraph.)
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