BARGAIN BANKER
THE government confirmed that it had hired one of the City’s top deal-makers yesterday – on an income believed to be no more than a tenth of what he earned at UBS.
Robin Budenberg joined UK Financial Investments (UKFI) for a bonus-free, pension-free bargain salary of just £155,000.
Friends said the banker, who they described as “thoughtful” and “creative”, had been used to drawing a lucrative pay package at UBS but that money was no longer a driving force behind his career decision.
One said: “I can see him doing this, then going to the House of Lords in a flash, or to the Bank of England.”
Budenberg, a 25-year veteran of UBS that qualified as a chartered accountant with PricewaterhouseCoopers in 1984, has been responsible for leading the Swiss bank’s role in advising the government on its bailouts of the British banking sector.
His £155,000 salary at UKFI – the vehicle set up by the Treasury to manage the government’s stakes in banks – is a mere 8.4 per cent increase on the £143,000 received by his predecessor John Kingman, who is leaving to join the private sector.
But his new pay packet will be a sharp reduction on his compensation at UBS, which is understood to have effectively doubled salaries for top bankers earlier this year to compensate for restrictions on bonuses.
Budenberg’s first responsibility in his new role will be to manage the break up of bailed-out lender Northern Rock into a “good” and a “bad” bank, after the European Commission yesterday gave the green light to the restructuring plan.
UKFI will now be tasked with channelling the Rock’s retail deposits and healthy mortgages into the good bank, while the bad bank, will be responsible for winding down the toxic loans and will eventually be liquidated.
In autumn last year, Budenberg – who lives with his wife and three children in a village outside Colchester – was part of a team of bankers that advised chancellor Alistair Darling on the £500bn bailout of the banking sector.
The workaholic and golf lover also advised on the nationalisation of lender Bradford and Bingley and the sale of British Energy to Électricité de France in 2006.