Jes Staley fails to have ban over Epstein links scrapped
The former boss of Barclays has lost his bid to overturn a decision by the City regulator to ban him from holding senior positions in the financial services for 'recklessly' misleading it about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.
The ruling by a court in London deals a severe blow to Jes Staley, who had been seeking to salvage his reputation by challenging the findings of an investigation by the Financial Conduct Authority, which concluded in October 2023 that Staley had 'acted with a lack of integrity'.
The case revolved around a letter that Staley, 68, allowed Barclays to send to the authority in October 2019, in which the bank told the regulator that Staley 'has confirmed to us that he did not have a close relationship' with the sex offender and that his 'last contact' with the paedophile was 'well before' he joined the lender in December 2015.
In a 93-page ruling handed down on Thursday, the Upper Tribunal said: 'On the basis of our findings Mr Staley failed to disclose appropriately information of which the authority would reasonably expect notice.'
Although it upheld the regulator's decision to ban Staley, it told the authority to reduce a fine it had imposed on the Barclays boss to £1.1 million from £1.8 million. The court decided that the financial penalty should be lowered to account for the fact that Staley had forfeited deferred shares from Barclays as a result of the affair.
It is a legal battle that has engrossed the City of London. Staley spent five days in the witness box in March as part of a 12-day hearing on his case. Andrew Bailey, the governor of the Bank of England, and Nigel Higgins, the chairman of Barclays, were also among the witnesses and the tribunal concluded that both had been 'straightforward' with the court.
Judge Timothy Herrington concluded, however, that there were occasions when Staley 'did not do his best to assist the tribunal in his answers'.
He said: 'Although we do not consider that Mr Staley sought deliberately to mislead the tribunal we have found that some of his evidence lacked credibility.'
The court was also critical of the authority over the way it initiated its inquiry in 2019. The regulator's work started when Jonathan Davidson, who at the time was a senior official at the watchdog, contacted Higgins, who was on holiday, to ask him what the bank had done to understand Staley's Epstein links.
A note of this call dictated by Davidson was 'clearly inadequate', the court said. 'It did not meet the standards prescribed by the authority for what is described as a 'note for the record'.'
Staley, an American, was once one of Britain's top financiers and ran Barclays for six years until November 2021.
Before joining the FTSE 100 bank he had spent most of his career at JPMorgan, America's biggest lender, and it was while rising through the ranks of the group that he met Epstein, an influential financier who was a client of the Wall Street giant's private banking division.
The paedophile died in prison in 2019 awaiting trial on federal charges of sex trafficking under-age girls. Epstein had in 2008 also pleaded guilty in Florida to procuring a minor for prostitution.
Staley has said that he met Epstein in either 1999 or 2000 and the tribunal heard that the former Barclays boss had maintained a relationship with the sex offender after he was first jailed in 2008.
The FCA did not allege that Staley was aware of, or involved in, Epstein's crimes that came to light in 2019, when the sex offender was arrested again.
Staley said on Thursday that he was 'disappointed by the outcome and the time it took for this process to play out, that was entirely beyond my control.
'As the tribunal accepted, I was never dishonest, it took years of arguing with the authority and until November 2024 to establish that fact and it took more time for the financial penalty to be reduced by 40 per cent.'
Therese Chambers, the regulator's joint executive director of enforcement and market oversight, said: 'Mr Staley chose to take a calculated risk that we would take his inaccurate account of his relationship with Mr Epstein at face value. He hoped that the truth would never come to light and that he would get away with it. Such a serious lack of integrity flies in the face of the requirements we place on those at the top.'
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