– HSBC paid 192 staff more than £1m (Guardian, Feb. 27, 2012):
HSBC, the biggest bank in Europe, handed more than £1m to 192 of its top staff in 2011, a year when profits at the bank slipped 6%.
As the chairman, Douglas Flint, described overall performance as “satisfactory in aggregate”, the bank admitted that 64 of the 192 paid more than £1m were based in the UK.
The shares were one of the biggest fallers in the FTSE 100 as even though at first sight the profits were up 15% at $21.9bn (£13.8bn), the market focused on a $17.7bn figure which stripped out $3.9bn of gains on the value of the bank’s own debt.