Barclays bank boss resigns suddenly after probe finds his connection with convicted sex offender closer than he revealed
Barclays boss Jes Staley is "shell-shocked, angry and upset" at the conclusion of a probe into his links to sex offender Jeffrey Epstein which has led to his sudden exit from the bank.
Insiders close to Mr Staley said he was surprised by City regulators' findings.
They have been investigating if Mr Staley's links with the dead financier were closer than first thought.
Barclays said it had been made aware of the conclusions of the probe and "Mr Staley's intention to contest them".
At the heart of Mr Staley's departure is apparently a perceived inconsistency between his account to his own board of his relationship with Epstein and evidence seen by the regulators.
Mr Staley insists that while Epstein was an important client of JP Morgan, where Mr Staley worked for a number of years and as such they were in contact regularly, their dealings were well within the grounds that could be described as professional.
The BBC understands the regulator took the view that the volume and tone of the emails between the two suggested a closer relationship than the purely professional. But Barclays has stated that the report makes no findings that Mr Staley saw, or was aware of, any of Epstein's crimes.
In fairness to Mr Staley, he is not the only boss of Barclays to have fallen from grace in recent times.
In fact, he is the bank's fifth chief executive in seven years - following in the footsteps of men such as Bob Diamond, who resigned over an interest rate-rigging scandal, and Antony Jenkins, who was sacked after falling out with the board over the bank's cost-cutting and profitability.
During the pandemic, he spoke out against the culture of working from home, saying it was "not sustainable".
At a virtual meeting of the World Economic Forum, he said: "It will increasingly be a challenge to maintain the culture and collaboration that these large financial institutions seek to have and should have."
Now Barclays faces the task of maintaining its culture without him - and he may prove a hard act to follow.
Regulators began investigating the Barclays boss after getting a cache of emails between the men from Mr Staley's former employer.
Before joining Barclays the married father-of-two was an executive at US bank JP Morgan, where Epstein, who took his own life in 2019 while in prison, was already a client.
Over many years, Epstein, who was convicted of trafficking a minor for prostitution in 2008 and served 13 months in custody, cultivated contact with the rich and powerful, including former US presidents Bill Clinton and Donald Trump.
Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates has spoken of his "huge mistake" in spending time with Epstein, while the equally super-rich Leon Black stood down from US private equity firm Apollo Global Management over his links.
Although Mr Staley, 63, has characterised his relationship with Epstein as professional, with contact starting to "taper off" from about 2013, regulators wanted to know whether the emails pointed to a friendlier connection.
Mr Staley had already admitted he maintained contact with Epstein for about seven years after his 2008 conviction. And it is also known Mr Staley visited Little St James, a retreat owned by Epstein in the US Virgin Islands in 2015, months before taking the top job at Barclays.
Source: BBCÂ
