A general recycle compensator, applicable to multivariable plants, is derived. For the single-variable case, the internal model control method is used to design robust controllers for the compensated plant leading to an overall better system than for the case of the uncompensated plant while, for the multivariable case, diagonal proportional plus integral controllers ensuring performance robustness are obtained by minimizing a performance index and considering the robustness measure as a constraint in the design. Again, the overall dynamic characteristics of the system resulting from the compensated plant are more favourable than those of the system resulting from the uncompensated plant.