Portrait of the week | 7 July 2012

Home 

Bob Diamond resigned as chief executive of Barclays a day after he said he wasn’t resigning. Marcus Agius resigned as chairman of Barclays, and a day later was appointed ‘full-time chairman’ to seek a replacement for Mr Diamond. The imbroglio followed a £290 million fine (£59.5 million by the British Financial Services Authority and the rest by American authorities) for Barclays’ having filed false information on its borrowings in connection with the setting of the London Interbank Offered Rate (Libor). Barclays said that, in a telephone call in 2008, Paul Tucker, the deputy governor of the Bank of England, had passed on to Mr Diamond queries from Whitehall about why Barclays’ Libor submissions were so high; Barclays said that the enquiry was interpreted by Jerry del Missier, its chief operating officer, as an instruction from the Bank of England not to keep Libors so high. Mr del Missier resigned this week.