By Huw Jones
LONDON, Sept 16 (Reuters) - A plan by global regulators to curb bank bonuses amounts to a government policy to increase profits but it will be tricky to implement and hit European banks hard, financial laywers said on Wednesday.
The Financial Stability Board (FSB) is putting together proposals to restrain bank remuneration for the G20 summit in the U.S. city of Pittsburgh to adopt on Sept. 24-25.
The aim is to temporarily curb excessive dividends, bonuses and share buybacks so that bank profits are used to build up capital to new, higher levels and allow banks to continue lending to aid economic recovery. [ID:nLF600494]
France and Germany want the G20 summit to adopt strong measures to curb excessive bank bonuses that have sparked public anger amid huge bailouts of the sector and rising unemployment. [ID:nLG723206]
Lawyers said it was unclear how the proposals would work.
"How do you link individual bonuses to individual performances? It's a really very difficult one," Simon Gleeson, a partner at Clifford Chance law firm in London told reporters.
Separately, Michael Wainwright, a partner at Eversheds said: "Limits of this kind will be at odds with other requirements on banks to base bonuses around personal long term performance. And there will be competition between different bank divisions for a larger share of the pool."
The planned FSB curbs would also make it harder for a bank to agree a bonus scheme with an executive as it won't know what its future results will be and thus the size of its bonus pool, Wainwright added.
The UK Financial Services Authority opted for a code of best practice on banker remuneration for the simple reason that no-one knows how to write binding rules that work, Gleeson said.
Pressure on banks to hold more and higher quality capital could also impact bonus levels.
Tom Pax, a regulatory expert at Clifford Chance in the United States said this could give U.S. banks an advantage over European peers as they already tend to hold higher quality capital. Analysts say many European banks may have to raise fresh equity to meet new capital quality requirements as they rely on lower quality debt-like hybrid capital at the moment.
"It will hurt the Europeans much more," Pax said.
Gleeson sees regulatory changes on bonuses and capital requirements sparking structural changes such as financial executives seeking to move beyond the reach of bank curbs.
News emerged on Wednesday that dozens of leading bankers at
Societe Generale
Gleeson said if mandatory capital requirements become prohibitive and move above the level needed by the market to continue doing business with a bank then sources of less regulated credit would emerge elsewhere.
(Reporting by Huw Jones, Editing by Toby Chopra)