Senior executives in Goldman Sachs, the US investment banking group, will not receive bonuses this year, the latest sign that Wall Street is tightening its belt in response to a deepening recession and mounting pressure over excessive boardroom pay.

The bank confirmed last night that its board had agreed at a meeting yesterday to withhold bonuses from seven of Goldman’s most senior executives.

They include Lloyd Blankfein, the bank’s chief executive, who had made a request to Goldman’s compensation committee that the bonuses be cut this year.

Mr Blankfein and his six colleagues, including Jon Winkelried, president and co-chief operating officer, and Gary Cohn, also co-chief operating officer, will therefore be paid only their base salaries of $600,000 (£408,000) each this year.

News of the decision came as the head of another huge Wall Street bank, Vikram Pandit, the chief executive of Citigroup, was preparing to rally its 350,000 staff with a message aimed at restoring morale. Mr Pandit will seek to address mounting concern about job cuts and poor performance.

The withdrawal of Goldman Sachs’s executive bonuses represents a stark change of fortunes for the bank’s senior executives, who have traditionally been among the most highly paid on Wall Street.

Mr Blankfein, who replaced Hank Paulson as chief executive when the latter was appointed as US Treasury Secretary in 2006, earned a total of $53.4 million that year, including a bonus of $27.3 million. In 2007, he earned a total of nearly $68 million. Mr Cohn and Mr Winkelried received more than $65 million last year after the company reported the biggest profits in Wall Street history.

However, the recent turmoil in the global banking industry forced Goldman to accept $10 billion in emergency funding from the US federal government last month. Since then, the bank has come under growing pressure from Congress to end its culture of excessive pay, which emerged as a major issue in the US presidential election.

It was unclear last night whether the new measures could affect middle-ranking executives in Goldman Sachs or the award of stock options.

Last month, Goldman Sachs said it was cutting almost 3,300 jobs, or about a tenth of its global workforce.

Goldman and Morgan Stanley, a competitor, were both forced to become bank holding companies in the wake of Lehman Brothers’ collapse in September. The change was designed to protect the banks from the financial chaos that pulled down Lehman, but it also requires them to reduce leverage, which will have a knock-on effect on profits.

The withdrawal of bonuses for top executives may help to soothe anger that Goldman, perhaps more than any of its big Wall Street peers, escaped the worst ravages of the banking crisis.

The collapse of Lehman Brothers has been well documented, and Merrill Lynch, another Wall Street stalwart, was forced into the arms of Bank of America.

The other executives affected by Goldman Sachs’s decision to halt bonuses are David Viniar, the chief financial officer, and Michael Evans, Michael Sherwood and John Weinberg, vice-chairmen.

Banks worldwide have fired more than 150,000 people since the credit crunch began.

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