Spare a thought for the poor bankers.

Out of curiosity, I looked up the last published accounts of the 3 main banks AIB, Anglo & BOI to see how the main men involved there might be suffering financially from the catastrophic collapse of the share prices of their banks.

Anglo - only issued preliminary accounts for y/e 30/9/08, the last published full set of Annual Accounts was for the year ended 30th September 2007
At that date, Chairman Sean Fitzpatrick owned 4.5m shares, which would have been worth €75m+ at their peak price.
Chief Executive David Drumm owned 511k shares, worth €8.5m+ at peak, and had 1.2m share options.
All the above are probably worthless now.

AIB – last published accounts are for year ended 31st December 2007.
At that date, Chief Exec Eugene Sheehy owned 256k shares, worth c. €6m at their peak price. Today they’re worth about €250k.
In addition, Sheehy had 120k share options and a further 251k in a Long Term Incentive Plan scheme – all of these are presumably so far under water that they’re worthless.

BOI – last published accounts are for year ended 31st March 2008.
At that date, Chief Exec Brian Goggin owned 600k shares, worth c. €11m at their peak price. Today they’re worth c. €360k.
In addition, Goggin had 398k share options and a further 402k shares in a Long Term Incentive Plan scheme. All these are now probably worthless.

None of these guys will be on the breadline, but at least they will all have taken a very serious hit to their personal wealth, never mind their reputations.

It’s appropriate that they should be sharing our financial pain.
It may make you feel a little better.