Barclays in fresh pensions storm

MATT Barrett, the Barclays boss whose massive new salary has reignited the row over fat- cat pay, is already enjoying a £500,000 annual pension from his previous employer, Financial Mail discloses.

p>He has picked up more than £1.15m in pension payments from Bank of Montreal, the Canadian bank he quit two-and-a-half years ago. News of Barrett's £10,000-a-week Canadian pension comes just days after Barclays said it would more than double the amount it pays into Barrett's tailor-made UK retirement fund.

Barrett, 57, will now receive pension contributions from Barclays of at least £990,000 - an astonishing 1,300 times more than one of his junior bank staff can expect into their money purchase scheme. He has also just negotiated a new three-year pay deal that could earn him as much as £15.3m.

Major investors in the bank are still smarting from Barclays' decision to allow them only limited discussion on Barrett's remuneration package before it was published and say they will look closely at the new deals. One fund manager said: 'You would have thought that after the huge kicking we gave the bank over Barrett's original package a couple of years ago that it would have learned its lesson. It looks ominously as though Barclays has just reverted to type - a cynical reaction would be to suppose that it is trying to hide something.'

Barclays' huge payment into a money purchase scheme for Barrett, who is only three years away from retirement, follows revelations by Financial Mail last week that many company directors are being given vast sums to persuade them to move out of final salary pension schemes while their staff are being forced to make the same move, often with lower company contributions.

Barclays scrapped its final salary scheme before Barrett joined in 1999. But the bank will now contribute some 90% of his £1.1m salary into it.

Other new recruits must make do with a riskier, money purchase scheme where Barclays pays as little as 5% of salary. A spokesman for banking union Unifi said: 'This is a setback in the relationship between staff and the executive.'

Barclays has defended the payments to Barrett, claiming he could earn more in the international jobs market. The bank points out that its share price has risen faster than many rivals since he joined.

But Barrett was the architect of a hugely unpopular scheme to charge customers £1 for using cash machines. He also presided over the disastrous closure of a swathe of the bank's local branches.