Barclays: The bottomless trough

It must be really good working for Barclays Bank - if you are the boss.

Not, of course, if you are one of the hundreds made redundant from its IT department recently.

Or if you worked in Poole and were one of the 126 made redundant in its pensions department as the company exported jobs overseas

Or if you were one of the 1,400 axed in the first half of 2011 - or even the other 1,600 who were also chopped in the second half of the year.

Oh, and if you were one of the 4,500 staff in the crap after the merger with Dutch bank A&B Amro you ain't a happy bunny. And let's not forget 6,000 axed in 1999.

Barclays, according to the press, is a highly successful bank which didn't land in the poo very badly during the subprime crisis - that is if you disregard the fact that it availed itself of around £4 billion from the Bank of England's Special Liquidity scheme at the start of the bailout.

But if you are the appropriately named chief executive Bob Diamond, then you are working for what must be the world's best employer.

This Diamond geezer must be wandering around in sheer confusion working out how the hell he is going to manage to spend his salary.

Because it is pretty breathtaking. Totalling around £17.7 million over three years, Mr Diamond's package included £2.7m of performance-related pay this year - up from £2.3 million in 2010 despite a 3 per cent fall in pre-tax profits and a share price that has fallen 23 per cent in the past 12 months - and a "tax-equalisation" payment of £5.75m, awarded to cover the fact that his move back to Britain from the US left him with a dirty great tax bill.

Not a bad deal that. It's understood that Barclays is going to cover all Mr Diamond's taxes - and it's rumoured that isn't just for the one year, either.

And let's not mention shares handed over to him as a perk. In 2009 he made £27m selling special shares in the bank's asset management arm, Barclays Global Investors.

Schemes put in place three and five years earlier came to fruition, so £15m of shares were released to him through these arrangements.

In 2010 his pay came to a cool £6.75m, with another £6.75m in long-term incentives.

Incredibly, he wasn't even the best-rewarded among the Barclays top brass, being outstripped by two investment bankers - Jerry del Missier and Rich Ricci - who were reportedly awarded £47m and £44m respectively after they cashed in various share options.

But, overall, Diamond remains among the best paid men in the world.

Next Friday, the Barclays AGM will see attempts by shareholders to query his earnings, triggered by the unpalatable, to them, fact that it paid £2.1bn in bonuses last year - more than three times the £700m used to pay shareholders' dividends.

But all this will really amount to is a squabble among the super-rich about the division of the spoils.

Although Barclays has insisted that bonuses were down 25 per cent on the year, the amount of revenue used to fund bonuses at Barclays Capital continued to hit 35 per cent - and that isn't pleasing the avaricious shareholders one little bit.

To illustrate the irrelevance of all this to normal people, Barclays has already won over Standard Life, which owns 2 per cent of Barclays shares, by linking half of Diamond's £2.7m share award to a doubling of shareholders' return on equity.

Which really just amounts to shoving the fattest pig aside a bit so other porkers can sink their unappealing snouts further into the trough.

The pigs are arguing among themselves. Not much change there, then. Perhaps Friday will see a loud spat or, perhaps, it will all be smoothed over.

Either way, there won't be any significant change for working people.

The trough will still be full of pig snouts and it is of little relevance to us which pig gets the bigger portion.

And it's almost unbelievable that this quarrel over shares of the swill can be advanced as evidence of some kind of "democratic" control over the City's excesses.

It's really just an argument between shareholders and company executives as to who gets the biggest slice of the action and, no matter who wins, it's the company's workers who lose.

While inflation has been steadily climbing and wages have been pegged back over the period of the crisis - let's keep in in mind that it was the banking industry that caused the crisis in the first place - the argument between shareholders and top executives has been gaining pace.

Remember as well that a huge number of shareholders in most publicly quoted companies have never contributed a brass farthing to the company's welfare.

They have just bought shares from other shareholders who bought them in their turn from previous shareholders and so on, ad nauseam.

The idea of "returning value" to the shareholders is so much poppycock. It's just another term for continuous asset-stripping.

And when Mr Diamond, in company with other top earners in his bank - as well as in almost all big enterprises - gets as perks some millions of company shares as part of his bonus, well he just can't lose, can he?

But that's not true for the rest of us, including the rank-and-file workers at Barclays itself.

While the porkers wallow, we just have to sit there and watch them. Or do we?