The disgraced former Barclays chief executive tried to identify a whistleblower at the UK bank in June 2016
Ten years ago this month Jes Staley, the disgraced former chief executive of Barclays, tried to unmask a whistleblower at the bank, a violation that saw the then 59-year-old hit with a 642,000 fine.
The Financial Conduct Authority said that Staley failed to “act with due skill, care and diligence” in his response to anonymous letters received in June 2016 that raised concerns about Tim Main, a senior employee the former CEO recruited earlier that year.
The letters, which were treated as whistleblowing, flagged concerns of a personal nature about Main, who was a friend of Staley and had previously worked with him at JPMorgan.
Rather than recuse himself from the matter and hand over the issue to the bank’s independent compliance team, Staley asked the bank’s then head of security, Troels Oerting, to try to identify the author of the letters, a move criticised for consequently lowering people’s willingness to blow the whistle.
Oerting, who had previously worked for Europol, contacted US federal law enforcement agencies to attempt to track down the origin of the two letters, which were said to be from a Barclays shareholder and had a US postmark.
The FT reported in 2018 that a US postal official was tricked into helping Barclays track down the writer. According to the US Postal Service, the person had been misled into thinking the letter contained “inside information...
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