🔒 Premium: Dumping Barclays: fresh scandal shows never just one cockroach in the kitchen

It’s four and a half years since we dropped Barclays shares from the BizNews portfolio. After purchasing them in April 2016, we decided to leave the party after a scandal emerged around then new CEO Jes Staley. To paraphrase Warren Buffett famously, if you see one cockroach in the kitchen be sure it has cousins nearby.

The 2017 scandal involved Staley abusing his power when hunting down an internal whistleblower. Although he survived that fallout, the world now knows he had a much bigger skeleton – a cosy relationship with an infamous sex offender, the late Jeffrey Epstein.

The story from our partners at the Financial Times was splashed over the newspaper’s front page on Saturday. Staley’s relationship with Epstein was exposed, by his former employer JP Morgan which handed over a staggering 1,200 emails he exchanged with Epstein over a four year period. That’s an average of more than one every working day. Eisch.
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More for you to read today:

* Helen Suzman Foundation’s obituary to FW de Klerk. Much needed balance to the revisionist ranting about SA’s Gorbachev.

* Bitcoin Creator Satoshi Nakamoto Could Be Unmasked at Florida Trial. Lawsuit over a $64bn cache looks beyond the pseudonym to solve the mystery of who created the cryptocurrency.

* Elon Musk Joins the Tax Debate. The billionaire’s contribution is more lyrical than coherent, but what else is new?

* If you missed it on Thursday evening, click here for the recording of my review of the 2021 MTBPS. Please forgive the lapse during the intro – it’s Lion’s Head (NOT Signal Hill) over my shoulder.


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