By Jonathan Stempel
NEW YORK, March 24 (Reuters) - A U.S. judge on Friday dismissed a former Barclays Plc trader's whistleblower lawsuit accusing the British bank of firing him after he complained it ignored basic risk management and violated its own policies for detecting rogue trading.
U.S. District Judge Paul Oetken in Manhattan said Brian La Belle, who had been Barclays' head of commercial real estate trading, could not sue under the federal Sarbanes-Oxley whistleblowing law.
La Belle's job termination in late July 2018 came at a time Barclays had been under intense scrutiny over its treatment of whistleblowers.
In May 2018, British regulators fined Jes Staley, then Barclays' chief executive, about 642,000 pounds as punishment for trying to unmask a whistleblower. Barclays also clawed back 500,000 pounds of Staley's compensation.
Much of La Belle's case concerned "mandatory block leave," where Barclays required some employees to take 10 consecutive business days off with no access to its computers, to prevent wrongdoers from covering their tracks.
La Belle, of Hampton, New York, said he was forced to work twice through mandatory leaves in 2017, with colleagues calling him on his personal cellphone to avoid detection, only to be threatened by a supervisor to keep quiet.
He also said Barclays fired him after he reported misconduct internally and to U.S. regulators a few weeks earlier concerning two clients and another employee.
Oetken, however, said Sarbanes-Oxley did...
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