City bankers to get £5million in bonuses each for avoiding credit crunch

Bankers at Goldman Sachs are to share a record bonus pool of £9bn - with dozens of senior partners in the London operation pocketing up to £5million each.

The bank, nicknamed Golden Sacks for the huge bonuses paid to its star performers, began telling its 5,000 City staff yesterday how much they would be getting this year.

Top earners include Simon Dingemans, 44, who is Goldman's senior mergers and acquisitions banker in Europe.

He is in line for a £10million bonus in a mixture of cash and shares.

Michael Sherwood, co-chief executive in Europe, Yoel Zaoui, head of European investment banking, and Karen Cook, managing director of investment banking, should also pocket multi-million pound windfalls.

Goldman has advised on a series of lucrative takeover deals including the £11billion merger of healthcare retailers Alliance and Boots, the proposed £64billion merger of mining giants BHP Billiton and Rio Tinto, and the £1billion sale of Countrywide Estate. But perhaps more importantly, the bank has managed to avoid the worst of the fallout from the collapse of the U.S. subprime mortgage market.

This is in marked contrast to rivals Citigroup, Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley, where annual payouts and profits have been decimated by risky bets they took on the American mortgage market.

With remarkable foresight, Goldman predicted in the spring that the U.S. housing sector would hit the buffers and sold off a lot of its liabilities to rivals just weeks before the ceiling fell.

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Goldman has around 400 partners who typically share a bonus pool worth 20pc of the total payout, which means windfalls of up to £5million.

But big fee earners make much more.

Last year Goldman's star Driss Ben-Brahim is believed to have scooped a £50million bonus - a record for a single City trader.

Based on a total bonus pool of £9billion across Goldman's global workforce, staff will be banking £300,000 on average in January's pay packet.