Dresdner bonuses culture exposed - FT.com One of the 104 investment bankers suing for €50m in unpaid bonuses told the UK High Court on Thursday he had expected a further €300,000 bonus in 2008 despite already receiving a €300,000 guaranteed bonus from Dresdner for that year. Desmond McNamara, who was head of risk management for capital markets at Dresdner, is the first banker to give evidence in a landmark case in which bankers formerly employed by Dresdner are suing Commerzbank for unpaid bonuses. Commerzbank acquired the German bank in 2009. Their claims range from €15,000 to €2m. Mr McNamara, who earned a £130,000 annual salary, told the court he had received a €300,000 guaranteed bonus for 2008 but was suing over a further €300,000 he claims he was promised by his line manager. He said the value he and his team had added to Dresdner was "substantial" as they worked out the bank's positions after the collapse of Lehman in 2008. Under cross examination he said his line manager had told him his performance during the year merited the further payment and this amount "was not set by me." He also said he did not require his bonuses "to live from day to day" but he was "happy" to have been included on a confidential list of Dresdner bankers who had been guaranteed bonuses that year. The former Dresdner bankers claim they were told at a "town hall" meeting in August 2008 that a guaranteed bonus pool of €400m had been allocated to staff to be awarded on a discretionary basis. Bankers claim they later received a 10th or nothing of what they had expected. Earlier Commerzbank claimed in written arguments that the 104 investment bankers were all paid "substantial sums" but "their complaint is that they were not paid enough." Thomas Linden QC, acting for Commerzbank, told the court that despite the bonus scheme, which was designed to retain staff, some bankers only stayed at Dresdner "because they were rejected by employers they applied to." Commerzbank claims in court documents that the bankers "do not say that they agreed to do anything in return for this substantial entitlement." The bankers "merely continued to do the jobs which they were [well] paid to do." The written arguments for the bank also quote from the witness statement of Jorg Hessenmüller, a senior Commerzbank executive, who claims Dresdner's financial situation in early 2009 was "so perilous" Commerzbank had to inject €4bn of capital into the bank because of the "acute danger" to the continued existence of Dresdner as a going concern and because its capital ratios had fallen below minimum regulatory requirements. The trial continues.