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Barclays Ex-Security Head Said to Have Left After Expense Probe

Barclays Ex-Security Head Said to Have Left After Expense Probe

(Bloomberg) -- Troels Oerting, Barclays Plc’s former head of information security, was asked to leave the bank after he was found to have billed personal expenses to the company, according to people familiar with his departure.

When the bank began probing Chief Executive Officer Jes Staley’s attempt to unmask a whistle-blower, it discovered the unrelated matter of Oerting’s improper expenses, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the terms of his departure have not been disclosed. On one occasion, Oerting took family members out for a meal and reported it as a work-related event, the people said.

Barclays Ex-Security Head Said to Have Left After Expense Probe

Oerting, who has left, has since been named head of the World Economic Forum’s global center for cyber security, and started last week.

A spokesman for Barclays declined to comment. Oerting and the WEF didn’t respond to requests seeking comment.

Oerting, the former head of the European Cybercrime Center and Denmark’s Serious Organized Crime Agency, joined Barclays in February 2015 to help the bank bolster its digital defenses. He became involved in Staley’s whistle-blowing scandal when the CEO asked him to track down the author of a letter that made accusations about one of Barclays’s senior investment bankers, Bloomberg News has reported.

Oerting then sought assistance from the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, people familiar said previously. The U.K. Financial Conduct Authority has been investigating Staley’s actions for a year and hasn’t publicly updated on a conclusion. The CEO could lose his job if regulators deem him unfit to run a financial institution. The bank has previously declined to comment pending the outcome of the FCA probe.

Oerting’s departure wasn’t linked with his attempt to track down the anonymous sender, the people said.

Barclays has hired Tim McNulty, formerly of JPMorgan Chase & Co., as Oerting’s replacement, according to a memo this month, the details of which were confirmed by a spokesman.

To contact the reporter on this story: Stephen Morris in London at smorris39@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Ambereen Choudhury at achoudhury@bloomberg.net, Keith Campbell, Darshini Shah

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