Barclays boss forgoes bonus

The Barclays boss said he would give up any handout for 2012 “to avoid further unnecessary public debate on this matter.”

He joins Stephen Hester at RBS who’s also said he won’t take any bonus because of an IT glitch at Natwest last year. But frankly, given the size of RBS’s imminent Libor fine, a mounting payment protection insurance bill and the mis-selling of interest rate swaps, an IT glitch should be the least of Mr Hester’s worries.

Right move

But he’s right to do so and so is Mr Jenkins. I wonder if there’s anything in Mr Jenkins’ timing too. Only this morning, another potential scandal has raised its ugly head. That Barclays, in 2008, was so desperate to avoid taking a government bailout (which many, including me, said at the time it so clearly needed) that it lent the Qatari’s money to invest back in Barclays. The bank declined to comment today.

But everyone suspected at the time it was a ruse to keep John Varley, its then Chief Executive and Marcus Agius, Barclay’s then Chairman, from having to go through the humiliation of knocking on Gordon Brown’s door. For an old-school, establishment banker like Agius, that would never have been an acceptable outcome. So what better than to dress up a much needed capital injection as a “win-win investment” from Qatar?

Stink

To many observers it stank at the time and it still stinks now.

But even more so today after the FT’s story. And given what we now know about some of Barclay’s traders rigging Libor at the time – again, to try and make Barclays appear more financially healthy than it actually was – the Qatar story raises more serious questions. Besides we know the Financial Services Authority and the Serious Fraud Office are both investigating Barclays over its disclosures around the Qatari deal.

Could it be that Barclays was so desperate it gave Qatar money to invest in its shares? On the one hand it does seem very strange, since Qatar isn’t exactly in need of loans, but perhaps that was the only way it would agree to a deal? Certainly other Barclays shareholders were angered at the time because they felt the Qataris, and other investors from Abu Dhabi, were given favourable terms.

The Libor scandal has already seen off Bob Diamond, Barclay’s boss after Mr Varley stepped down. Anthony Jenkins – a Barclays banker of the more traditional mould – has made it his raison d’etre to turn Barclays inside out and scrub it clean, from top to bottom. Yet the sins of the bank’s past appear to be coming back to haunt him too.

Follow Siobhan Kennedy on Twitter: @siobhankennedy4