How is it possible that we’re still reading headlines about the £4 billion fundraising from the Gulf that saved Barclays from a bailout in 2008? It’s not too sweeping to say that most of the financial world smelled something fishy in the undisclosed £322 million of advisory fees that were paid to Qatari investors – and that whiff never went away, despite the collapse of criminal charges against individuals at Barclays in 2019.
The Financial Conduct Authority has called the behaviour of Barclays ‘reckless and lacking integrity’, while recognising that the bank ‘is a very different organisation today’. But not so different as to actually acknowledge its fault: Barclays ‘does not accept the findings’ of the regulator but ‘wishes to draw a line’ by accepting a final £40 million fine to close the file.
The whole episode remains a stain on Barclays and a parable of the danger of urgent decision-making under market pressure. Most of all, it spotlights the failure of regulators and the law, over 16 years, to pinpoint precisely which acts or actors were culpable in a transaction that so many market practitioners felt in their bones had crossed a line of City propriety.
Bank-breaker
Scott Bessent, the New York hedge-fund player picked by Donald Trump to be his treasury secretary, is the man who ‘once broke the Bank of England’ – as Alternative Fund Insight puts it. Before establishing his own investment firm, Bessent was a protégé of the Hungarian-American speculator George Soros and a member of Soros’s Quantum Fund team that made $1 billion by shorting the pound on Black Wednesday in 1992.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in