Last week, on Thursday 24th April, Barclays PLC had is Annual General meeting at the Royal Festival Hall in London. Massive UK press coverage about how the bank has had reduced profits, yet the bonus pool was up. A large investor, the revered Scottish investor of Standard Life objected to the bonus pool, a sign that a crucial long term shareholder, objected to the size of the bonus pool, when business performance over the past 12months was down, thus the reduced profits.
One can get great insight into the bonus pool and what the shareholders get when you drill down into the annual report.
[http://reports.barclays.com/ar13/]
Firstly let’s look at the balance sheet:
Total assets £1,312,267million = £1312 billion = £1.312 Trillion
Now UK GDP is £1.5111 Trillion, so Barclays balance sheet is 86% of the UK GDP. It is incredible.
Page 46 shows the size of the trading activity of the Investment Bank (Barclays Capital). “Total assets decreased £209.9bn to £863.8bn, primarily reflecting decreases in derivative financial instruments, cash and balances at central banks, and trading portfolio assets.” Yes, assets of £863.8 billion. (that is equal to 57% of UK GDP)
Now page 58 is where the numbers get interesting, as this is where we see The Remuneration Report.
“…After adjustments for risk and conduct, total incentive awards granted were £2,378m,…” That tells us the bonus pool is £2,378m = £2.3 Billion.
Page 12 shows us the dividend paid to shareholders. That is 6.5p per share.
Who are the largest shareholders? See page 90
Qatar Holding LLC with 813,964,552 shares
BlackRock, Inc with 805,969,166 shares
The Capital Group Companies Inc with 809,174,196 shares.
These top three shareholders own over 15% of the bank
Now reading the regulatory report [http://otp.investis.com/clients/uk/barclays/rns/regulatory-story.aspx?cid=68&newsid=402209] the total number of shares in Barclays are: 16,390,273,900
So one can now work out the total dividend received by shareholders:
16,390,273,900 shares X £0.065 = £1,065,367,804 = £1,065 million = £1.065 Billion
So we can see that the bonus pool of £2,378m is more than twice the amount of money than what the shareholders get which is only £1,065 million.