More than 800 bankers in the UK were paid at least €1m (£736,000) by four major US investment banks in 2014.
The regulatory disclosures by four US banks – Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America Merrill Lynch and JP Morgan – expose the number of financial professionals being handed €1m or more six years after the financial crisis.
Documents published by the UK arm of Goldman Sachs show that 262 of its key staff received at least €1m, with 10 of these receiving more than €8m. Morgan Stanley paid €1m or more to 190 individuals and Bank of America Merrill Lynch paid those sums to 159 staff. JP Morgan disclosed payments of €1m or more to 287 people. The 898 individuals who received more than €1m were predominantly based in the UK.
The figures cover the year to the end of 2014 and have been been disclosed in recent months to comply with EU rules.
Bank of America disclosed it paid six staff between €5m and €10m. Morgan Stanley lists seven as receiving over €5m without putting an upper limit on the pay deals, as does JP Morgan, which said eight were handed more than €5m.
In September, the European Banking Authority, the pan-European banking regulator, published data for so-called high earners for 2013 when it found 3,178 bankers were paid more than €1m, of whom 2,086 were based in the UK. That total had fallen from 3,530 in total in 2012, with 2,714 of them in Britain.
UK banks had published some of the information earlier in 2015 in their annual reports. Barclays, for instance, revealed 359 people were paid more than £1m, compared with 481 the year before.
The disclosures about pay follow the revelations a fortnight ago that seven City banks paid a combined £21m in corporation tax in 2014. Between them the banks, together employing about 33,000 mainly City workers, generated UK profits of £3.6bn on revenues of £21bn in the UK.
