Bonus time for BPI

EMBOLDENED by the 33-percent rise in net income the past year, chairman Jaime Augusto Zobel de Ayala III, his brother Fernando and the rest of the board of the Bank of the Philippine Islands are seeking stockholders’ approval to please grant them higher bonuses.

The Zobel brothers and the BPI directors last year each received P1.2 million in yearend gratuity, for service rendered in 2009.

“Historically, for the last 10 years, the bank has been paying directors’ bonus equivalent to an average of 0.26 percent of the net income of the bank,” BPI said in a statement to the shareholders.

This year, the board wants to bump up the total compensation formula (per diem plus bonus) to “one percent of the net income before income tax during the preceding year.”

The proposal, BPI said, hews closely to the principle that “compensation should fairly pay directors for work required in a company of the bank’s size and scope.”

How does this scheme translate to actual numbers? Let’s do some numbers-crunching.

For 2010, the Zobel bank reported a net income before income tax of over P11 billion, slightly lower than the previous year’s P11.688 billion.

(The figures vastly improve, after consolidating BPI’s income with the dozens of its subsidiaries, to P14.589 billion from 2009’s P12.184 billion. These were the figures recently reported by BPI when it announced a 33-percent jump in 2010 earnings.)

To continue: one percent of P11 billion equals P110 million.

Divide P110 million by 15 board members and that translates to P7.33 million for each BPI director.

No wonder former Finance Undersecretary Romeo Bernardo feels so much power between his legs when he is out biking with the Zobel brothers! –Victor Agustin, Manila Standard Today