LONDON BRIEFING:The 'Posh and Becks' of the City are sitting pretty after betting on a bad year for the banks, writes Fiona Walsh

CRISIS? WHAT credit crisis? As the financial markets this week mark the grim first anniversary of the global credit crunch, for some in the City of London it remains business as usual.

For the high-profile hedge fund manager Crispin Odey, a very lucrative business it is too. It has just been revealed that Odey (49) paid himself almost £28 million (€35.3 million) in the year to April, making him one of the City's most lavishly remunerated players - and one of the biggest winners to emerge from the global market turmoil.

And it undoubtedly makes him the higher-earning half of the couple known as the "Posh and Becks" of the City - his wife is Nichola Pease of JO Hambro Capital, one of the few top female fund managers in the City of London.

The golden couple, who live in a Georgian townhouse in Chelsea with their three children, are already estimated to be worth £300 million, according to the Sunday TimesRich List.

Pease (47) is Odey's second wife - he was formerly married to Prudence Murdoch, eldest daughter of media tycoon Rupert Murdoch.

Pease also comes from a powerful family - her father, Sir Richard Pease, helped found Barclays Bank and Barclays chief executive John Varley is her brother-in-law. Her brother Richard is also a leading fund manager at New Star Asset Management.

The credit crunch may have taken Barclays and its banking rivals by surprise but Odey realised early on that the over-stretched financial sector was heading for disaster, and was an active short-seller of banking shares. He is understood to have started betting against the banks in the summer of 2006 - a full year before the rest of us realised just what was in store for the global financial system.

He was also quick to spot the looming global food crisis and his Odey Asset Management firm has invested heavily in commodities and bought up farmland around the world. As he so succinctly put it: "Sell banks, buy cheese."

A former Barings Bank executive, Odey set up on his own in 1991 and his Mayfair-based firm is one of London's oldest hedge funds. The firm has £2.68 billion under management in a dozen or so different funds and earned £20 million in management fees over the last financial year, a slight decline on the previous year.

However, its performance fees rocketed from just £1 million to £43 million and profits from £15.6 million to £55 million. After Odey's bumper £28 million pay package, the remaining £27 million was shared by 11 other partners in the firm.

There have been a few glitches along the way - in 1994 Odey made spectacular losses after the US Federal Reserve unexpectedly raised interest rates. And he came in for some unfavourable press earlier this year when his firm emerged as one of those to have taken short positions in the troubled Bradford & Bingley bank.

Odey's short position in the bank, worth around £800 million, was revealed under the new disclosure rules imposed in June by the City watchdog, the Financial Services Authority, in an attempt to stamp out suspected market abuse.

One bank Odey did not bet against, however, was Northern Rock, where his wife was a non-executive director. It emerged yesterday that the UK government is giving additional financial support to the nationalised Newcastle-based bank after it reported bigger than expected loss of almost £600 million over the first half of the year.

In its first set of results since it was taken under government ownership, Northern Rock warned that it would remain "significantly loss-making" for the rest of the year, as its arrears mount alarmingly. Not surprisingly, the biggest arrears have been seen in the bank's controversial 100 per cent-plus loans, which allowed borrowers to take out mortgages worth up to 125 per cent of the value of their property.

These loans were withdrawn in February but there has been a dramatic increase in the number of repossessions from those who had already taken them out, and have since been unable to meet their repayments.

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The City of London has suffered a major setback in its long-running battle for tenants with glitzy rival Canary Wharf, with the surprise news that JP Morgan Cazenove is to decamp to Docklands.

JP Morgan Cazenove is one of the Square Mile's largest and most prestigious firms and had been planning to move to new premises in the City, at St Alphage House in the Barbican.

In pulling out of the project, the bank cited insufficient room for its trading floors. But there were fierce protests from local residents living in the Barbican estate and these are thought to have played a large part in the investment bank's decision to move instead to Canary Wharf.

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Fiona Walshwrites for the Guardiannewspaper in London