Barclays announces departure of bank staff

LONDON (AFP) ― Barclays on Monday said that its finance director and top legal expert had decided to leave the bank, as the British lender undergoes a shake-up in the wake of the Libor rate-rigging scandal.

“Barclays has today announced that the Group Finance Director Chris Lucas, and the Group General Counsel Mark Harding, have decided to retire from the company,” the bank said in a statement.

The pair would remain in their roles until the appointment of successors ― a process expected “to take a considerable time to complete” considering the seniority of the positions, Barclays added.

Lucas is one of several past and present Barclays staff being investigated over whether the bank broke rules over a sizeable cash injection from Qatar in 2008 amid the start of the global financial crisis.

News of his and Harding’s departures meanwhile comes as Barclays seeks to draw a line under the Libor affair, which last year led to the resignation of Bob Diamond as the bank’s chief executives and of other board members.

Diamond’s replacement, Antony Jenkins, on Friday said he would give up his 2012 bonus ― reported by media to have been worth at least 1 million pounds ($1.6 million) after a “very difficult year” at the bank.

Barclays lurched into crisis last June when it was fined 290 million pounds by British and U.S. regulators for attempted manipulation of Libor and Euribor interbank rates between 2005 and 2009.

The Libor system was found to be open to abuse, with some traders lying about borrowing costs to boost trading positions or make their bank seem more secure.