Barclays’ Jenkins was London’s ‘Great Rainmaker,’ Lawyer Says

(Bloomberg) -- It took “the great rainmaker in the City,” former Barclays Plc executive Roger Jenkins, to save the lender by negotiating billions of dollars in investment from Qatar at the height of the 2008 financial crisis, a lawyer for a fellow defendant told a London jury.

Jenkins was able to persuade the wealthy Gulf nation’s then-Prime Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim al Thani, who also ran its sovereign-wealth fund, to invest 4 billion pounds ($5.2 billion), William Boyce, who is representing Richard Boath, a former Barclays executive who worked with Jenkins on the deal, said Friday in court.

“A single phone call from Sheikh Hamad could send simply astronomical value in the direction of those in his favor,” Boyce said. “If anyone could persuade him to do that, it was Roger Jenkins, the great rainmaker in the City, the man who gets things done, the man renowned for his ability to bring in value.”

Jenkins and Boath, along with another former bank executive, Tom Kalaris, are on trial for allegedly failing to disclose approximately 322 million pounds in investment fees paid to Qatar in June and October 2008 and instead disguising them as fake advisory service agreements, or ASAs. The three pleaded not guilty.

According to his lawyer, Boath didn’t agree to or negotiate the ASA and complained about it constantly. His corporate title of managing director for the financial institutions group for Europe, the Middle East and Africa was misleading about his seniority, Boyce said.

“All banking titles are ludicrously inflated,” Boyce said. Managing director “was just a title, given to a large number of bankers, to make them sound important.”

The court had previously heard recordings of Boath bantering on a phone call about going to jail, which his attorney described as the “poor jokes of stressed and tired men.”

--With assistance from Franz Wild.

To contact the reporters on this story: Ellen Milligan in London at emilligan11@bloomberg.net;Eddie Spence in London at espence11@bloomberg.net

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

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