Goldman Sachs almost doubles Blankfein pay package

NEW YORK: Goldman Sachs Group Incorporated awarded Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Lloyd C. Blankfein, $19m, in compensation for 2010, almost double the prior year, and granted him the first cash bonus in three years, Bloomberg reported on Saturday.

The total includes $5.4m in cash, $12.6m in restricted stock, a $600,000 salary and about $464,000 in other benefits, the New York-based firm’s proxy statement showed. Blankfein’s $9.8m pay for 2009 included $9m in restricted stock plus salary and other compensation.

Goldman Sachs, the fifth-biggest United States bank by assets, boosted Blankfein’s compensation for a year in which earnings dropped by 38 per cent and the stock price was little changed. The amount falls in the middle ground between 2008, when Blankfein, 56, and six other senior officers got no bonuses, and the record-setting $67.9m award he received for 2007.

“The fact that they would return to a more market-based pay is probably not surprising” after lower amounts for 2008 and 2009, said Rose Marie Orens, a senior partner at Compensation Advisory Partners LLC in New York. “They’re not quite back to anything remotely like what they paid in the prior years.”

Goldman Sachs’s 2010 share performance – a decline of less than half of one per cent – outstripped competitors including Bank of America Corpration and Morgan Stanley, which was the second- biggest US securities firm after Goldman Sachs before both converted to banks in 2008. Shares of JPMorgan Chase & Co., which reported a record profit last year, rose-1.8 per cent during the year.

All 30 members of the Goldman Sachs management committee received only restricted stock for their 2009 bonuses and four of them – Chief Financial Officer David A. Viniar, 55, President and Chief Operating Officer Gary D. Cohn, 50, and Vice- Chairmen J. Michael Evans, 53, and John S. Weinberg, 54 – received exactly the same $9m award as Blankfein.

For 2010, Goldman Sachs once again matched all of those four executives’ bonuses to Blankfein’s $12.6m in restricted stock and $5.4m in cash. All four also received a $600,000 salary in 2010.

“They’ve had a history of paying their top five like partners,” Orens said. “It’s unusual, but it really comes from their partnership mentality.”

The firm disclosed in January that Blankfein’s salary would increase to $2m in 2011 and that Cohn, Viniar, Evans and Weinberg would each receive a $1.85m salary starting this year. Each of them had received a $600,000 salary since 1999, the year the firm became a public company.