Ana Botin collected salary and bonuses worth more than £4 million as the chief executive of Santander’s British division last year, despite the bank posting a slump in annual profits.
Ms Botin, part of the Spanish family dynasty that controls Santander, received more than £2.3 million in annual bonuses for 2011 on top of her base salary of £1.7 million, according to the annual report, published today.
She received additional benefits, which for directors often include a car or driver and health insurance, worth £52,000.
Her payouts covered a year when profits at Santander UK tumbled 40 per cent to £993 million after the bank became embroiled in the scandal over the mis-selling of payment protection insurance.
Santander UK set aside £538 million to cover compensation claims for missold policies, which were designed to protect customers’ loan repayments when they fell ill or lost their jobs but were often sold to people who would not qualify for payments.
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If the effects of PPI were stripped from Santander UK’s profits, they still came in 6 per cent lower at £1.5 billion last year.
Ms Botin arrived at Santander in January 2011 with a promise to ramp up the bank’s lending to small and medium sized businesses.
She replaced António Horta-Osório, who was recruited as the new chief executive of Lloyds Banking Group.
The annual report reveals that executives, including Ms Botin, were all denied awards under the bank’s long-term incentive scheme last year.
It is thought that Ms Botin and her colleagues were not entitled to long-term awards because they are so-called “code staff”, responsible for strategic and risk-taking decisions at the bank.
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Ms Botin was not penalised for the bank’s PPI charge. Santander scrapped direct sales of PPI before her arrival in a decision taken by Mr Horta-Osório.
Ms Botin received two bonuses. The first, of £926,000, was paid half in cash and half in shares that will not be available to her for 12 months.
A further £1.388 million is payable in three tranches from 2013 to 2015, also half and half cash and shares.
Together, executives at Santander UK received a total of £7.686 million last year, according to the annual report.
A spokesman for Santander UK said: “Santander UK has delivered a solid performance in difficult conditions without resorting to government assistance, generating consistent profits and cash for the Santander Group, which in turn has paid €24 billion (£20 billion) to shareholders over the past five years, of which 1.6 million reside in the UK.”
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Details of the payments at the Spanish bank’s UK arm mark the latest in a series of disclosures by Britain’s big five lenders about awards made to company executives and investment banking staff.
Barclays kicked off the bonus reporting season last week, revealing that it had paid Bob Diamond, its chief executive, annual salary and bonuses worth £6.3 million.
When the vesting of previous awards, future payments that were earned last year and other benefits are added together, Mr Diamond received an estimated £24.5 million.
Barclays’s pre-tax profits fell 3 per cent to £5.9 billion last year.
Both Mr Horta-Osório and Stephen Hester, the chief executive of Royal Bank of Scotland, waived their annual bonuses last year but both are on course to receive millions under long-term incentive schemes.