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When Hewlett-Packard’s Chief Executive Mark Hurd resigned last month he received something few regular workers see when they quit their jobs under a cloud: A massive payout.

Turns out Hurd is far from the only top executive to be rewarded with a rich package despite a management performance that could be considered less than optimal — especially by rank-and-file workers.

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NEW YORK – BP PLC will pay shareholders $2.63 billion in dividends on June 21 as investors and U.S. lawmakers wait to see what the oil company decides about future payouts.

The company announced the dividend on April 27, one week after a BP well in the Gulf of Mexico exploded and set off the largest oil spill in U.S. history. Lawmakers have urged the company to postpone its dividend for the second quarter. BP hasn’t announced plans yet for future dividends.

Holders of ordinary shares will receive 14 cents. Holders of American depositary shares get 84 cents. Each ADS represents 6 ordinary shares.

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Yet few batted an eye this week when Wall Street revealed its latest round of pay excess. Giant Wall Street banks set aside $39.2 billion to pay their workers in the first quarter.

That’s up 9% from a year ago, driven in part by a return to bubble-era profit levels.

The gains came even as the staff at the big six banks — Citigroup, Bank of America (BAC, Fortune 500), Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase (JPM, Fortune 500), Morgan Stanley and Goldman — shrank by 2%.

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NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — The government’s plan to tax Wall Street’s bonus bounty is shaping up to be nothing more than a pipe dream.

Hoping to ride the wave of populist outrage against financial firms like Goldman Sachs, lawmakers have been hard at work hatching legislative schemes aimed at reining in bonuses at firms that received billions of dollars in taxpayer aid.

Bonus, given again. Why so much to handle money? What did he and all the others do to desire that big of a bonus? A lot of Americans do a good job every day and we are lucky we get paid. I didn’t understand why they have to get so much for a bonus.

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NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — Goldman Sachs stunned many in the Wall Street community Friday by awarding chief executive Lloyd Blankfein $9 million as his year-end bonus, far less than many were anticipating, and none of it in cash.

Following weeks of speculation about what the top executive at Wall Street’s leading investment bank would take home as his discretionary pay for 2009, the company revealed in a securities filing it was paying Blankfein 58,381 shares of company restricted stock.

Big bonus,is he worth it? No one is worth that kind of bonus just because he works with money.
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NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — JPMorgan Chase Chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon will take home a nearly $16 million bonus in restricted stock and options for leading the bank to a big profit last year.

In a company filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission Friday, the New York City-based bank said Dimon would collect nearly 200,000 shares of restricted stock and more than a half million in options.

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NEW YORK – JPMorgan Chase & Co. on Friday announced a record $9.3 billion payday for its investment-banking employees, setting the stage for competitors like Goldman Sachs Group Inc. to also make eye-popping payouts.

On a per employee basis, JPMorgan investment bankers, sales staff and traders, on average, are set to make about $379,000 for 2009, up more than $100,000 from 2008, when the broader financial sector was mired in crisis.

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NEW YORK (Fortune) — The odds aren’t on its side, but a bonus tax could happen in the United States too.

The United Kingdom this week slapped a 50% tax on bankers’ bonuses above about $40,000. The one-time tax will be paid by all banks with employees in the country. France pledged it would adopt the same policy, while Germany’s chancellor called the idea “charming.”

Still, the bonus tax seems like a long shot on this side of the Atlantic, where bankers wield immense power. But when Wall Street starts handing out giant year-end paychecks at a time of 10% unemployment, all the campaign donations in the world may not keep legislators facing tough re-election fights from turning on their banker chums.

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WASHINGTON – The Obama administration’s pay czar is limiting the cash compensation for executives at companies that received the largest taxpayer bailouts to $500,000.

The 25th through the 100th top earners at Citigroup, GMAC, American International Group and General Motors also must take more than half their compensation in stock, and at least half must be delayed for three or more years, said Kenneth Feinberg, the Treasury Department’s Special Master for Executive Compensation.

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NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — In the end, pay czar Kenneth Feinberg’s hardest case was AIG.

The troubled insurer lobbied hard to let three of its executives keep their bonuses.

AIG told Feinberg that three executives, who were entitled to large retention payments, were particularly critical to the company’s long-term financial success and should be able to keep their bonuses.

Feinberg said Thursday that he relented in the case of AIG even though he was able to pare down similar pay clauses at the other six companies in his purview.

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NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — The Treasury Department, after missing an opportunity to rein in controversial bonuses to AIG employees last year, is now pressing the bailed out insurer to reduce a $198 million bonus pool, according to an overseer’s report released Tuesday.

Neil Barofsky, the special inspector general of the $700 billion bailout program, said that Treasury pay czar Kenneth Feinberg has recommended to AIG that the full $198 million not be paid out in full.

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NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — AIG Chief Executive Robert Benmosche’s $10.5 million annual pay package has been formally approved by Obama administration pay czar Kenneth Feinberg.

According to a letter to Treasury’s compensation committee dated Oct. 2, Feinberg said Benmosche’s package, $4 million of which is in stock options, is comparable to that of other CEOs.

Benmosche, who took over the bailed out insurer’s reins in August, will take home $3 million in cash. His “stock salary” will come in equally divisible, bimonthly payments of common shares. Under the terms of his pay deal, he can’t sell those shares until August 2014.