(Adds further detail, background)
By Kirstin Ridley
LONDON, Feb 28 (Reuters) - Three former Barclays
executives were acquitted in London on Friday of charges they
helped funnel 322 million pounds ($418 million) in secret fees
to Qatar in return for rescue financing during the credit
crisis.
In a blow to the Serious Fraud Office (SFO), a jury cleared
Roger Jenkins, Tom Kalaris, and Richard Boath of fraud.
The men, aged between 61 and 64, all denied any wrongdoing.
Qatar, a major investor in Britain and still a significant
Barclays shareholder, was neither investigated nor accused of
wrongdoing.
The verdict draws a line under an ambitious,
seven-and-a-half year investigation that led to the first
criminal charges in Britain against senior financiers at a major
bank over credit crisis-era conduct.
It also marks the likely end of efforts by prosecutors to
hold top bankers to account for decisions taken when the global
financial system was brought to its knees, forcing taxpayers
into bank bailouts totalling hundreds of billions of pounds.
The taxpayer-funded SFO filed the charges one month after
the ruling Conservative Party pledged to abolish the
investigator and prosecutor and roll it into a national
crime-fighting force in 2017.
But the case has been beset by setbacks. The most senior
defendant, former CEO John Varley, was acquitted last June and
the SFO case against Barclays itself, which also centred on
alleged unlawful financial assistance to Qatar through a $3
billion loan in 2008, was dismissed in 2018.
SECRET PAYMENTS
The case turned on two undisclosed payments made by Barclays
to gas and oil-rich Qatar during a two-part, 11 billion pound
emergency fundraising in June and October 2008 that allowed the
bank to avert a state bailout.
Prosecutors had alleged Middle East investment bank head
Jenkins, Kalaris, who ran Barclays' wealth unit, and former
financial institutions head Boath conspired with former finance
director Chris Lucas to disguise a 42 million pound payment to
Qatar. The SFO said the bankers used an advisory services
agreement (ASA) to mask the fact Barclays was paying Qatar more
than twice the fees it was paying other investors that June.
Jenkins, described as the "gatekeeper" to the Qatari
relationship, was also charged over the bank's 280 million
pound, five-year ASA struck with Qatar four months later.
The men said the ASAs were intended as genuine mechanisms to
pay Qatar what it wanted while extracting lucrative, commercial
business from Qatar, that such side deals were common in
banking, that senior directors had authorised the parameters of
negotiations and, along with lawyers, had approved the deals.
A lawyer for Lucas, who was not charged because he was too
ill to stand trial, has declined to comment.
($1 = 0.7696 pounds)
(Reporting by Kirstin Ridley
Editing by Alexander Smith)
Barclays (BARC)