£3m worth of shares awarded to RBS bosses

Fixed share allowances worth £3.2 million for the six months to December 31 have been awarded to bosses at still 73 percent state-owned Royal Bank of Scotland.

The total, calculated before tax, includes an allowance worth nearly £490,000 for the bank’s chief executive Ross McEwan, who earlier this year was awarded £1.2 million worth of stock as part of RBS’s long-term incentive plans (LTIPs).

The fixed share allowances were introduced by banks in 2014 after the European Union capped the amount of bonuses that could be paid to top executives to 200 per cent of their salaries.

Mr McEwan is entitled to receive a fixed share allowance equal to his basic annual salary of £1 million, as granted by the UK government which reamins the majority shareholder.

However, RBS, which was bailed out by taxpayers at the height of the 2008 financial crisis at a cost of £45 billion, said Mr McEwan will give 30,664 of his newly allocated shares, worth around £85,000, to charity.

This follows the transferring of all of his fixed share allowance for 2015, and half of his allowance for 2016, to charity.

New Zealand-born McEwan, who was appointed chief executive of Edinburgh-based RBS in 2013, took home a total pay package worth nearly £3.5m in 2016, a year which saw the bank report a loss of £7 billion as its balance sheet continued to be crippled by the cost on ongoing legacy issues.

In September Mr McEwan was named among the potential candidates to take the helm of Australia’s largest bank.

The Financial Times reported that the New Zealander is on a shortlist to become the chief executive of Commonwealth Bank of Australia, where is previously served as a director of the lender’s retail banking division.