RBS Paid 95 Bankers More Than 1 Million Pounds in 2012

Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc (RBS), Britain’s biggest taxpayer-owned lender, paid 95 employees more than 1 million pounds ($1.5 million) last year.

RBS paid its top 10 executives about 21 million pounds in total compensation in 2012, compared with about 25.3 million pounds in the previous year, the Edinburgh-based lender said in a remuneration report today. Chief Executive Officer Stephen Hester was paid 3.27 million pounds for the year, up from 3.24 million pounds in 2011. He won’t receive a pay increase in 2013.

Britain’s largest banks are under pressure to rein in executive pay and cut costs after a series of regulatory missteps. RBS said last month it will cut its bonus pool and claw back some compensation to help pay the $612 million fine on interest-rate rigging. At Barclays Plc, CEO Antony Jenkins has said he won’t take a bonus following the Libor scandal.

RBS’s head of U.S. operations, Ellen Alemany, is the highest-paid employee below board level, earning 4.78 million pounds in 2012, said a person familiar with the matter, who declined to be identified because the details are private.

Hester, 52, spurned a bonus for 2012 after a computer failure left many of the bank’s 17 million customers unable to access their accounts for several days.

About 81 percent of RBS employees eligible for a bonus will receive less than 5,000 pounds, with 68 percent in line for a payout of less than 2,000 pounds, the firm said today.

To contact the reporter on this story: Gavin Finch in London at gfinch@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Edward Evans at eevans3@bloomberg.net