responsible banking

Barclays' profits in 2009: £11.6 bn
Amount paid out in cash bonuses and longer term awards to staff: £2.7 bn
CEO John Diamond's salary: £1.35 mn
Package of bonus and incentive shares for CEO: around £10 mn1
John Diamond's personal fortune, amassed over 10 years of salary, bonuses, incentives: £95m

'OK. Now I need 10 million in rewards. And about 1 1/2 million for my salary. How much can we spare in taxes for the rest of the country?'

Answer: a bit less than the salary of one Barclays CEO (without the bonuses). About 1% of the profits we've pulled in. Let's go for £113 mn2

But the rate of corporation tax in the UK is 28%, not 1%. So how do we do it?

[documents leaked to the Guardian] disclosed seven tax avoidance schemes operated by Barclays. Many of them were devised by structured capital markets boss Michael Keeley. They involved more than £20bn of loans typically shuttled between entities in Luxembourg and the Caymans, designed to generate hundreds of millions of pounds of tax reliefs, the proceeds frequently shared with US banks...

How the Guardian was gagged from revealing Barclays tax secrets

Number of Barclays' subsidiary companies based in offshore tax havens:
30 in the Isle of Man
38 in Jersey
181 in the Cayman Islands.

What a lucky tax break.

"I think payment of tax is an important responsibility of businesses, yes"
Barclays CEO in evidence to the Commons Select Committee

• 1. On top of [Mr Diamond's] £1.35m salary, he gets a performance-related package leading to an annual bonus of up to £3.4m. He is also entitled to incentive shares worth £6.75m. From Millionaire bankers' message to Britain: We're all right, Jack
• 2. amount paid by Barclays in corporation tax in 2009