Costa Cruises, the company that owns the stricken Costa Concordia cruise ship, has offered passengers just £9,000 each in compensation. It covers lost belongings and the emotional distress.So, if you were on the Costa Concordia as it struggled to stay afloat you get £9,000. If you were at RBS when it struggled to stay afloat you get £1,000,000.
Yes, Stephen Hester, the boss of the Royal Bank of Scotland, has caused some upset in the news for getting a £1m bonus. I don't actually mind the concept of rewarding failure; without it I wouldn't earn money doing stand-up.
Now he's facing pressure to give the money back. Have you ever known anyone linked to a bank to just give money back? No. These are people who send you a letter and charge you £15 for the privilege; he'll certainly think he deserves his money.
The Government says there's nothing they can do about it because Mr Hester had a contract and this bonus was in the terms of that contract. But RBS is effectively owned by the taxpayer now. That makes Stephen Hester a public sector worker, and we all know how much the Government likes to change the terms of those contracts even after they've been signed. If we can't take away his bonus can we at least bugger up his pension like we did with the teachers?
The share price of RBS has continued to go down but Stephen Hester is still going to get a performance related bonus of £963,000. If all they were looking for was someone who could ruin the share price they could've asked me. I can't even balance my cheque book, so I could've got some of that bonus action too.
Some people defended his bonus saying that he is worth that amount of money if that is what the market is willing to pay him. They compared the situation to a high paid footballer.
It is similar because footballers are paid too much, but if there was a team that got relegated, nearly ran out of money and then continued to make a loss, they wouldn't be paying for top players. They'd make do with some Sunday league types.
And how bad would a football team have to be before it needed a Government bail out?
Don't get me wrong, Stephen has a difficult job and he has done well to stop the bank from going under. But he gets a £1.2million salary for that. If the market says he's worth an extra million then he should get paid £2.2million. I'd rather people got the money in a salary than as a bonus. It's because you earn a salary but you win a bonus.
I'd rather someone thinks of themselves as an 'earner' than someone think of themselves as a 'winner', because that makes you sounds more like an utter dick.
One thing that has come out of this is a realisation that the taxpayers have ploughed billions into the Royal Bank of Scotland. So if the Scottish get independence, we're keeping the bank, OK? We've spent a lot of money on it. It's like being a bloke who renovated a house only to lose it in the divorce.
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