NEW YORK - GOLDMAN Sachs Group CEO Lloyd Blankfein and six other top executives at the bank will not be receiving cash or stock bonuses for 2008, a spokesman said on Sunday.

Swiss bank UBS to scrap chairman's bonus for 2008 GENEVA - UBS said on Monday it would not pay a bonus to its chairman and board of directors for 2008 after the bank was bailed out by the Swiss government amid billions of dollars in losses from the subprime crisis. 'The chairman of the board and the members of the group executive board will not receive any variable compensation for 2008,' the bank said in a statement.

The decision was made by the seven executives themselves, said spokesman Lucas Van Praag, and approved on Sunday by the Wall Street firm's compensation committee. The executives made the decision 'because they think it's the right thing to do', Mr Van Praag said.

The seven executives include Mr Blankfein; Presidents and Co-Chief Operating Officers Jon Winkelried and Gary Cohn; Vice Chairmen John Weinberg, J. Michael Evans and Michael Sherwood; and Chief Financial Officer David Viniar.

They will receive no cash bonuses, no stock, and no options for 2008 - just their salaries, the spokesman said. Companies typically release compensation figures for top executives in the spring as part of their annual proxy statements.

Last year, Blankfein received total compensation of US$54 million (S$822.3 million), according to calculations by The Associated Press - making him the 6th highest paid CEO at a Standard & Poor's 500 company in 2007. His salary that year was $600,000.

Goldman and Morgan Stanley were the only major US investment banks left standing after the buyout of Bear Stearns by JPMorgan Chase & Co, the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers Holdings and Merrill Lynch's sale to Bank of America.

Shortly after Lehman's collapse, Goldman and Morgan Stanley became bank holding companies - a move that subjects them to more oversight from the Federal Reserve, but that also gives them permanent and wider access to the central bank's lending programmes.

Goldman's shares closed Friday at US$66.73, down US$3.26, and are down 69 per cent since the start of the year. The firm is in the midst of cutting about 3,200 employees, or about 10 per cent, of its staff worldwide. -- AP