Ex-Barclays Head: Qatar Capital Was Not Vital To Bank’s Health

During a fraud trial on Tuesday (Feb. 19), the former chairman of Barclays bank said that Qatar was “not as central” to the bank’s plans to fundraise billions in 2008, according to a report in the Financial Times.

Marcus Agius was speaking during a trial of four former Barclays executives accused of lying to the market about fees it paid to Qatar in exchange for investment in the bank. He said the bank needed to raise money and “did not want to be behind the game” while the “level of uncertainty in the market intensified.”

“We at Barclays did not anticipate how much worse things were going to get,” he said.

The case is being prosecuted by the Serious Fraud Office, which alleges that senior bankers Roger Jenkins, Richard Boath and Tom Kalaris, as well as former CEO John Varley, were all involved in the emergency fundraising by the bank with Qatar.

The team is accused of hiding and lying about £322M paid to Qatar using two advisory service agreements. Varley and Jenkins are charged with two counts each of fraud by false representations, and Kalaris and Boath each have one count. The men have pleaded innocence at the trial, which is being held at Southwark Crown Court in London and could last as long as six months.

When asked about the payments, Agius he said he had other potential investors besides Qatar, including Temasek, China Development Bank (CDB) and Sumitomo.

Barclays, he said, wanted to work closely with Atar, CDB and Temasek so they would “grant us favored nation status.” Although Qatar had “extraordinary amounts of wealth,” it was “not as central at that point,” he said.

When asked about his relationship with Varley, Agius said he was “a man of the utmost integrity, highly intelligent with a formidable work rate,” and that Varley had to handle numerous problems while the bank unsuccessfully tried to take over ABN AMRO. “He was very open … I always found him good to work with,” he said.