By Donna Boehme
Corporate Compliance Insights
Originally published on February 13, 2013
It’s been a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad few weeks for Barclays. Despite tough talk last month by new CEO Antony Jenkins about “Five New Values” (inviting any of its 140,000 employees who don’t want to sign up to head for the exits), the bad news just keeps on coming for the embattled firm. And the latest round involves a shredder.
Last week’s headlines of “Shreddergate” and “Qatargate” spelled out the bank’s latest troubles. In the former, Andrew Tinney, the chief operating officer of the bank’s high-end investment division, commissioned a “workplace culture report” from an outside consultancy, but was so horrified by its contents that he shredded the report on the spot at his Surrey estate and then, according to media reports, “denied all knowledge of it ever having existed.” Neat trick, until an anonymous internal whistleblower emailed Jenkins a hint about the mysterious culture report. Add to this the latest revelations about a Qatari cash injection at the height of the financial crisis that may have been funded by the bank itself, which means the bank may have lied to UK regulators.
Mind you, this is after an annus horribilis in which Barclays was hit by a half a billion dollar fine for its part in manipulating LIBOR, lost its Chairman, CEO and COO in quick succession, and saw its credit rating lowered by Moody’s from “stable” to “negative.” The scandal ripples from that debacle continues, as the firm has just announced the exit of two more top execs: its finance chief and general counsel.
The entire article is here.
