RBS's Hester says his £7.7m pay is 'low'

17th Mar 2011 12:50

Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) chief Stephen Hester has defended his total pay package worth £7.7m as being at the "low-end" of jobs in the finance industry.When asked to justify his "huge" salary for 2010 by Labour MP Austin Mitchell, Hester told the Public Accounts Committee that it is "at the low end of comparable jobs in the UK and globally, albeit at the high end of society if you want to put it those terms."The £7.7m of total compensation Hester received last year includes his £1.2m basic salary, a £2m bonus in shares and £4.5m worth of shares deferred until 2014 under a long-term incentive scheme.His package has been criticised due to the taxpayer-owned bank losing over £1bn for the same financial year."Is it that you produced an outstanding enormous profit for the bank, or is it because you are a greedy banker?...What have you done for £7.7m?" Mitchell asked.Hester responded saying - "What I'm charged with doing is to try to run a large bank, on which many customers depend, in which the taxpayer has a great deal of financial exposure, to the best of my ability and that of my colleagues.""It is in the hands of others how they want to pay me for that and it is up to me whether I want to do the job for that."The bank revealed Thursday that some 323 top-level staff pocketed a total of £375m in 2010, equal to an average of £1.16m each.The average pay for the 148,500 employees at RBS was £60,309 in 2010, up from £56,439 last year, as the group's headcount fell by 12,400.