British finance minister Alistair Darling said on Thursday the issue of bankers' pay needed to be looked at on an international basis and would be discussed by G20 finance ministers in September. Darling also said that the fight against protectionism and delivering additional funding for emerging markets would also be discussed next month.
"Banks need to responsible about pay and bonuses and one of the things that is concerning me is that when you tackle banks about this they say that if you do something here, the Americans, the Swiss, or the French ... will poach our people. "This is something that I think we do need to tackle overall and it will be discussed by the G20 finance ministers in September," Darling told BBC radio. Finance ministers from the Group of 20 leading industrial and emerging nations meet in London on September 4 and 5.
"One of the measures on the agenda for the G20 finance ministers will be to ensure that everything we agreed to in London...including a commitment to breaking down, not erecting, trade barriers and making sure that we ensure that money that we promised to the IMF for emerging economies is there - that will be one of the major items on the agenda," he told reporters at a press conference in Edinburgh. Finance ministers meets in London in early September to lay the groundwork for a summit of world leaders later in the month in the US city of Pittsburgh.
The G20 summit in London in April pledged a headline figure of $1.1 trillion to boost financing through the IMF and to encourage trade to combat the worst recession since World War Two. Britain's financial regulator the Financial Services Authority (FSA) last week published a bankers' pay code which some critics said would not go far enough in preventing banks from paying sky-high bonuses to some of their biggest risk takers.