Barclays Banker’s ‘Air of Confidence’ Clinched Qatar Deal

(Bloomberg) -- Former Barclays Plc Middle East investment banking head Roger Jenkins said he relied on his “air of confidence” to close a deal with Qatar that would save the bank from a taxpayer bailout at the height of the 2008 financial crisis.

Jenkins, 64, made the comments on Friday, at the end of his first week of testifying in a London court, where he and ex-colleagues Tom Kalaris and Richard Boath deny fraud charges related to the Qatari deal.

Jenkins described the pressure on the Barclays’s team arranging the deal with the Qataris as the bankers tried to decide whether to disclose a personal investment from Qatar’s Prime Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim Al Thani -- who Jenkins described as being reluctant to display his huge wealth -- and how to structure extra fees the Gulf nation was demanding.

The jury also heard phone calls between some of the bankers in which they regularly swore and shared gallows humor because investors’ wavering led them to contemplate the demise of their vital capital-raising attempts. Jenkins’s good cheer in those calls contrasts with the gloomier outlook of Boath, who described himself as sounding like “an old woman.”

“As the pressure increased he was half empty and I was half full,” Jenkins said of Boath. “In my experience if you keep pushing you can get deals done. Rather than share your own anxieties with the counter-party and your client you have to have an air of confidence to get transactions completed when you are under this amount of pressure.”

Jenkins also described how he flew out of Qatar’s capital, Doha, even though he was desperate for a commitment from the Qataris in mid-June 2008, because he wanted to project strength by appearing to have other business in other countries.

The Qataris “are formidable negotiators and you can’t be seen to be waiting,” Jenkins told the jury. “I did not want to sit in Doha waiting to be summoned to be asked certain conditions and if they saw that kind of weakness they might press their advantage.”

Qatar and Sheikh Hamad ultimately invested 4 billion pounds ($5.2 billion) into Barclays over two rounds as part of more than 11 billion pounds raised on the market. In exchange, the bank paid 322 million pounds in extra fees structured through side deals in which the Qataris agreed to offer services to the bank.

The U.K. Serious Fraud Office alleges that the side deals were a sham, and there was no intention of the Qataris providing services. It alleges that Barclays hid the fees from other investors who weren’t getting the same rate.

Jenkins said he was developing a long-term business relationship with Qatar, and it would take “about a minute and a half” to briefly detail the sort of business that would generate the 42 million pounds Barclays agreed to pay for the first advisory deal. “It’s very easy,” he said, adding that Sheikh Hamad had made a personal commitment to deliver value for the payments.

“If the number had been 36 million, 38 million, 39 million, 42 million, the Qataris understood, we understood from them, that they would deliver value for the money,” Jenkins said. “We’re balancing Western culture, which requires nice, long English law agreements, and what I’ve referred to as a handshake culture in the Middle East in which long lengthy legal documents are sometimes viewed as going against the idea of trust.”

Ultimately, Barclays’s lawyers were involved in deciding the terms and approved them, Jenkins said. None of the lawyers have been accused of any wrongdoing.

To contact the reporter on this story: Franz Wild in London at fwild@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Anthony Aarons at aaarons@bloomberg.net, Christopher Elser

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