RBS's bonus tax payments confirm that its UK bonus pool was petite (UPDATED)

Cast your mind back to February 2010. At that time, you may recall, much was being made of an alleged 1.3bn RBS bonus pool which had supposedly been approved by the UK government.

Six months on, and it looks like RBS may have been much more frugal in the UK than everyone thought.

Today, the bank said it had paid 69m in the UK bonus tax this year. This follows a payment of 208m for 2009.

In total, therefore, RBS paid 277m in the UK bonus tax.

Given that the bonus tax amounted to 50% of all bonuses over 25k, this implies that RBS paid out a total of 554m in bonuses higher than 25k in the UK.

In total RBS global banking and markets (GBM) employs 17,000 people, of whom 2,400 are in the US and an unspecified number are in Asia. We are reliably informed that there are a total of 10,000 people working at GBM in London.

Given RBS's large London headcount, its bonus tax payments look frugal. Credit Suisse, for example paid out around 268k in the bonus tax, but is only thought to employ around 6,000 people in the City. Goldman Sachs paid 377k in the bonus tax and only employs 5,500 in London.

The likelihood (confirmed by various headhunters working for RBS) is that the Scottish bank targeted its mediocre London bonus pool very carefully: some people were paid very handsomely; most weren't at all.