Citi paid someone in London $9m to go away last year
This time last year, Citi's Bora Bora cuts had drawn to a recent end, with 7,000 instead of the planned 5,000 people cut as the bank removed entire layers of management.
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Somehow, during this process, Citi's London business paid a $9m severance payment to a single individual. The identity of the individual is not known, except that they were an "identified person" (a material risk-taker in sales and trading or investment banking). Nominations are accepted in the comments below.
The severance payment is revealed in Citi's newly released disclosure for its London global markets business. Most senior people removed from the bank received far less: Citi made $28m in severance payments to 37 identified staff in London in 2024, an average of $756k each. When the $9m paid to one individual is removed, the 36 others received $528k each. One Citi MD suggests this was heavily skewed towards a few people and that bulk of departing senior staff receive closer to $225k based on a "reference salary" of that amount.
As Financial News notes, Citigroup paid its London material risk takers (MRTs) average bonuses of around $680k for last year. However, not all the bank's London material risk-takers actually received bonuses for 2024: there were 504 non-executive MRTs at Citi, but only 480 got anything. 24 Citi MDs therefore received no bonuses at all in London. The 480 who did get bonuses received $727k each, which was still a lot less than the $1.2m on offer at Morgan Stanley or the $973k on offer at JPMorgan in London.
The chart below shows the number of people at Citigroup Global Markets who earned over €1m in 2024 versus previous years. The bank is surprisingly consistent in its overall generosity and always appears to pay at least three people over €10m. However, fewer people are receiving between €4m and €9m than in the recent past.
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