No. Bonus recipient is unaffected by this. It's simply a small one-off windfall tax dressed up as an attack on excessive bonuses. If a bank puts say 20% of profits into a it's bonus pool, most will go into sub-25K bonuses. Let's say half is caught by the tax. That's a windfall tax of 5% of banks' profits. Actually, it's even less since they would have had to pay tax on it anyway. The whole thing is just a face saving exercise for Darling. The banks get to keep most of their windfall profits and the bankers get keep their huge bonuses.
euclid, i dont doubt the ideal is for the government to look good and for the bankers to get even more money than they should, but this tax, as reported, is specifically a 50% tax on an individuals bonus payment on the amount of the bonus that is in excess of 25k, and then the receiver of the bonus would still be liable for the 40% tax rate on the original bonus value if all the bonuses were sub 25k, thats fine, but they are not i agree there is ambiguity in this, and it is also easy for banks to convert bonus to salary but the banks that are now owned by the government are not going to be able to play any games unless they want to get into tax avoidance/prison your take seems to be real different,could you explain it a bit more?
how can you pay a bonus if taxpayers had to give you money to survive? Of course he wants to tax bonuses as a way to recoup the money back.
I would understand if bankers at Royal Bank of Scotland, Lloyds Banking Group and Northern Rock which recieived bailout money from UK were affected, but not anyone else. Much like the US, the UK did just fine on their investments in these banks. At least in RBS, its more than a double from where they took 80%. Every GS, DB, CS banker in the UK is trying to get a transfer as we speak. Other banks received no money from UK as I understand it, why would they need to fund bailout of the these three local institutions?