It is an inventory that features the previous HBOS banker Peter Cummings, the previous Co-op Bank finance director Barry Tootell and the previous Credit Suisse First Boston dealer James Archer, son of the creator and Conservative peer Lord Archer – and now it consists of Jes Staley, the previous Barclays chief govt.
Banning somebody from working in monetary companies is among the final sanctions that may be delivered to bear by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA). It is a draconian measure and one the regulator workouts comparatively hardly ever.
That makes the ban imposed as we speak on Mr Staley – who’s interesting towards the judgement – all of the extra extraordinary.
Make no mistake, that is a fully seismic occasion.
Being chief govt of one in every of Britain’s ‘large 4’ industrial banks – Barclays, NatWest, HSBC and Lloyds – are among the many most prestigious roles UK monetary companies has to supply. Never earlier than, although, has a chief govt of one of many 4 ended up being banned from the City.
Think about a few of the nice bankers of the previous who’ve led the 4, for instance, Sir Brian Pitman at Lloyds or Sir Willie Purves at HSBC. The thought of them discovering themselves in such circumstances, being banned from the City, is unthinkable.
The irony is that, when Mr Staley arrived at Barclays in 2015, he was seen as providing the financial institution stability.
The door into the Barclays CEO’s workplace had lengthy been a revolving one. Martin Taylor, CEO since 1994, was felled after a boardroom coup in 1998. His successor, Michael O’Neill, lasted a day within the job after failing his medical. Then got here Matt Barrett, who lasted till 2004 with just some mishaps, together with telling a Commons choose committee he wouldn’t permit his youngsters to have a bank card.
The common Irish-Canadian’s successor was much less lucky. John Varley, who lasted till 2010, was later charged – and later acquitted – with conspiracy to commit fraud over a monetary crisis-era fund-raising. Bob Diamond, who succeeded him, was sacked on the orders of Mervyn King, the then Bank of England governor, over the financial institution’s Libor-rigging.
Antony Jenkins, CEO from 2012 to 2015, was presupposed to mark a change from Mr Diamond, below whom the funding bankers had reigned supreme in Barclays. The former head of the financial institution’s comparatively unsung retail operations, he was nicknamed ‘Mr Nice’ internally, for his efforts to rebuild the repute of Barclays and to distance it from the legacy points, mainly the Libor scandal, that had laid it low.
Unfortunately for him, he fell sufferer to the revenge of the funding bankers, who had by no means trusted him.
John McFarlane, the guitar-strumming, Feng Shui-loving, chairman on the time, determined that Mr Jenkins’s successor wanted to be somebody who understood funding banking in addition to industrial and retail banking.
It was for that purpose that he reached for Mr Staley, a Wall Street veteran who had spent 35 years at JPMorgan, though a lot of that point had been spent within the financial institution’s asset administration and personal banking divisions quite than in out-and-out funding banking on buying and selling.
Very a lot a ‘Boston brahmin’ – his grandfathers had been a high retail govt and the president of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his father the CEO of a chemical substances firm – Mr Staley initially made a superb impression.
But he shortly blotted his copy guide, being fined and censured by the regulator for making an attempt to unmask a whistle-blower, which proved an undesirable distraction. So, too, did a long-running marketing campaign by Edward Bramson, an activist investor, who sought unsuccessfully to get Barclays to spin off its funding banking arm.
Mr Staley lastly appeared to have received the day when, in November 2021, he was pressured out over his hyperlinks with Jeffrey Epstein.
By then, proof unearthed by the FCA and the Bank of England’s Prudential Regulation Authority had revealed he was far nearer to the disgraced paedophile than he had let on, with greater than 1,200 emails between him and Epstein courting again to his time at JPMorgan containing mysterious phrases akin to ‘snow white’.
It subsequently emerged that Mr Staley had even pressed executives at JPMorgan to retain Epstein as a shopper even after he had been jailed for soliciting intercourse from a minor.
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Shockingly, a few of the emails – cited by the FCA as we speak – even revealed that Mr Staley instructed Epstein he was in talks to take the highest job at Barclays, previous to his appointment.
The ban and nice issued as we speak isn’t the top of the matter.
Mr Staley has appealed towards the choice – which is why the FCA as we speak known as it ‘provisional’ – and has taken it to the FCA’s Upper Tribunal. It has overturned numerous such bans in recent times, together with one in 2021 on the Scottish insurance coverage govt Stuart Forsyth and one in 2019 towards Andrew Tinney, a former chief working officer of Barclays Wealth.
The Upper Tribunal has, in latest occasions, been extremely vital of the FCA’s excessive employees turnover and decision-making – whereas the burden of proof confronted by the regulator is much heavier than that confronted by Mr Staley himself.
Quite aside from his willpower to clear his identify, that is most likely why Mr Staley – who at 66 could be forgiven for eager to go and benefit from the riches he has collected in his profession – is persisting with an attraction.
As for Barclays, now being steered by the low-key CS Venkatakrishnan, it most likely needs the entire thing would go away.
Source: information.sky.com”