More than 80 employees of the state-backed Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) received pay deals worth more than £1m last year despite its £8.2bn loss, Sky News has learnt.
The figure, which is expected to be confirmed later this week, may further stoke the continuing row over bankers’ pay following RBS’s recent confirmation that it awarded more than £550m in bonuses last year.
The roughly 85 staff who were paid more than £1m represents a fall of more than 10% on the 2012 total of 95 employees.
It is also far lower than the 481 Barclays workers whose remuneration broke through the £1m threshold, a 10% increase despite a sharp decline in profits.
RBS is expected to confirm the number of millionaires in its ranks alongside a series of separate disclosures to the London Stock Exchange detailing deferred share payouts to some top executives.
Those announcements are unlikely to be contentious compared with previous years because RBS’s remuneration committee has decided that the awards should only vest to a modest extent after the bank’s weak performance, an insider said.
Britain’s big banks have run into another conflagration over pay in recent weeks, with only HSBC and Standard Chartered avoiding criticism from investors.
Lloyds, which is also part-owned by taxpayers, said on Wednesday that it had increased the number of millionaires on its books from 25 in 2012 to 27 last year.
It also confirmed Sky News’ revelation that it would hand Antonio Horta-Osorio, its chief executive, a fixed share allowance worth £900,000 on top of his £1m basic salary.
But it was Barclays which received the fiercest condemnation from shareholders, particularly after Antony Jenkins, its chief executive, said in an interview with The Daily Telegraph that he had had to pay higher bonuses to avoid its investment bank falling into “a death spiral”.
RBS declined to comment.