It pays to be the CEO of Goldman Sachs

How about fetching $69 million as a bonus? Interested? Try getting to the top spot in Goldman Sachs, they do pay this much!

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. CEO has been reportedly given whopping $69 million as the bonus in addition to his base salary of $600,000. He has donated around $200,000 of his pay to the firm's newly formed.

This by far, is the most a CEO has been paid in a year and a rise of around 30% as compared to last year when he was paid $53.4 million. The payment will be made in two ways: $26.8 million in cash and $41.1 million in stock and options awards which is divided as 112,675 restricted stock units and 322,104 options.

The bonus comes after a fiscal year of record profits for the fourth year consecutively, even as rivals sustained large losses from the widening subprime mortgage crisis which has hit the U.S. economy badly.

The Company’s Co-presidents, Gary D. Cohn and Jon Winkelried will each receive restricted shares and options of about $40.5 million which was around $25.7 million last year.

Goldman Sachs has been outperforming its rivals in the recent years building a strong image in the Investment Banking with its stocks rising 5% in the year 2007, while Morgan Stanley shares have lost 36%, Merrill Lynch shares have lost 40% and Bear Stearns shares have lost 44% during the period.

With so many banks underperforming, many financial firms were widely expected this bonus season to shift from cash to stock in an effort to compensate employees while retaining talent. Some firms have already said they would cap their cash compensation, including UBS, which announced a limit of $750,000 for its workers.

The crisis cost Chuck Prince and Stan O’Neal, the former heads of Citigroup and Merrill Lynch, their jobs while the huge bonuses taken last year by John Mack, of Morgan Stanley, and Jimmy Cayne, of Bear Stearns have been given up temporarily by the top officials.

Morgan Stanley announced that newly appointed Co-presidents Walid Chammah and James Gorman received bonuses of $8.9m and $8.0m respectively while this amount was somewhere close to $40 million last year.

Dick Fuld, Chairman and Chief executive of Lehman Brothers, also received a hefty $35m bonus for 2007, which is 4 per cent higher than the last year.