Olympic bosses have refused to accept pay cuts, even as they were being compared with bankers raking in bonuses during the recession.

The two men in charge of the Olympic Delivery Authority, the taxpayer-funded body that is building the venues for London 2012, said that they had a right to expect “the sensible, going rate” despite salary freezes across the public sector.

The £537,000 package awarded to David Higgins, the chief executive, makes him one of the highest-paid employees in the public sector.

The Australian engineer has voluntarily deferred until 2012 half of the £209,566 bonus to which he was entitled last year. But John Armitt, the chairman, who earns £250,000 for a three-day week, said that he would not be asking his colleague to forgo more.

“I would not dream of suggesting that Mr Higgins’s salary or his bonus structure should change because I think it is the right one for the task that he faces,” he told councillors at London’s City Hall.

“I’m not expecting sympathy from someone who’s getting £20,000 a year for someone who is getting £250,000 a year but we are in a market economy. I am not going to consider reducing the chief executive’s salary or package or reducing mine. It is the package that reflects the job.”

Staff at the agency received £1.8 million in performance-related bonuses for the year ending in March 2009.

Nearly 30 department heads earning between £70,000 to £100,000 enjoyed average windfalls of £18,000 each for the second successive year.

All but one of the eight directors earns a basic salary greater than the Prime Minister’s £197,000.

The Olympic Delivery Authority’s targets and related pay structure were agreed before the onset of the economic downturn. Ministers said that the policy of offering private sector salaries was designed to attract the best people in the industry.

During a heated exchange, Brian Coleman, a Conservative London Assembly member, said that the policy should be reviewed in the economic circumstances.

He asked: “How on earth, in a recession with spending cuts across the board, do you feel you can justify, particularly in the case of Mr Higgins, reward which is that of a City banker?”

Mr Armitt, a former chief executive of Railtrack, rejected the comparison, arguing that many of the 206 staff had given up higher-paid jobs in the private sector or lucrative government pensions to work for an organisation that would be wound up by 2012.

“The City has had its problems but we have done all we set out to achieve. We are on time and on budget,” he said. “It is fair that people should be sensibly rewarded and we should not expect them to take less than their worth in the marketplace. If we did not do that, we would not get the people that we need to do this project successfully.”