British bank Barclays yesterday named retail and business banking head Antony Jenkins as its new chief executive, replacing Bob Diamond who resigned last month over the interbank rate-rigging scandal.
“Barclays announce that Antony Jenkins has been appointed as a director and as group chief executive of Barclays with immediate effect,” the group said in an official statement.
The Briton’s appointment meanwhile comes one day after Barclays revealed that the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) has launched a probe into the 2008 investment deal between the bank and Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund.
Photo: Justin Thomas / Visual Media via Bloomberg
Jenkins declared that his top priority would be to repair the bank’s damaged reputation.
“We have made serious mistakes in recent years and clearly failed to keep pace with our stakeholders’ expectations,” he said in the statement. “We have an obligation to all of those stakeholders — customers, clients, shareholders, colleagues and broader society — and a unique opportunity to restore Barclays’ reputation by making it the ‘go to’ bank in all of our chosen markets.”
Jenkins, 51, was head of Barclays’ Retail and Business Banking (RBB) business. He has been a member of the group executive committee of Barclays since 2009.
US national Diamond resigned last month over the rate rigging scandal that engulfed the bank and sullied London’s image as a financial center.
The scandal erupted in June, when British and US regulators fined Barclays £290 million (US$453 million) after the bank admitted attempting to manipulate the Libor and Euribor rates between 2005 and 2009.
However, the fallout risks becoming much wider, with analysts claiming that the lender could face massive lawsuits, since mortgage rates passed onto customers were influenced by Libor rates.
Barclays had already announced that industry veteran David Walker would become its new chairman from November, succeeding Marcus Agius who also quit over the Libor affair.
Separately, Barclays had announced late Wednesday that the SFO had commenced an investigation into payments “under certain commercial agreements between Barclays and Qatar Holding LLC.”
The Financial Services Authority regulator revealed last month it was investigating fees paid by Barclays to Qatar during the 2008 credit crisis.
Qatar invested more than £2 billion into the bank in June 2008, and five months later it raised a further £6.8 billion from a group of Middle Eastern investors, allowing it to avoid being semi-nationalized.
DECOUPLING? In a sign of deeper US-China technology decoupling, Apple has held initial talks about using Baidu’s generative AI technology in its iPhones, the Wall Street Journal said China has introduced guidelines to phase out US microprocessors from Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) from government PCs and servers, the Financial Times reported yesterday. The procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favor of domestic options, the report said. Chinese officials have begun following the guidelines, which were unveiled in December last year, the report said. They order government agencies above the township level to include criteria requiring “safe and reliable” processors and operating systems when making purchases, the newspaper said. The US has been aiming to boost domestic semiconductor
Nvidia Corp earned its US$2.2 trillion market cap by producing artificial intelligence (AI) chips that have become the lifeblood powering the new era of generative AI developers from start-ups to Microsoft Corp, OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet Inc. Almost as important to its hardware is the company’s nearly 20 years’ worth of computer code, which helps make competition with the company nearly impossible. More than 4 million global developers rely on Nvidia’s CUDA software platform to build AI and other apps. Now a coalition of tech companies that includes Qualcomm Inc, Google and Intel Corp plans to loosen Nvidia’s chokehold by going
ENERGY IMPACT: The electricity rate hike is expected to add about NT$4 billion to TSMC’s electricity bill a year and cut its annual earnings per share by about NT$0.154 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has left its long-term gross margin target unchanged despite the government deciding on Friday to raise electricity rates. One of the heaviest power consuming manufacturers in Taiwan, TSMC said it always respects the government’s energy policy and would continue to operate its fabs by making efforts in energy conservation. The chipmaker said it has left a long-term goal of more than 53 percent in gross margin unchanged. The Ministry of Economic Affairs concluded a power rate evaluation meeting on Friday, announcing electricity tariffs would go up by 11 percent on average to about NT$3.4518 per kilowatt-hour (kWh)
OPENING ADDRESS: The CEO is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence at the trade show’s opening on June 3, TAITRA said Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) chairperson and chief executive officer Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) is to deliver the opening keynote speech at Computex Taipei this year, the event’s organizer said in a statement yesterday. Su is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing (HPC) in the artificial intelligence (AI) era to open Computex, one of the world’s largest computer and technology trade events, at 9:30am on June 3, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) said. Su is to explore how AMD and the company’s strategic technology partners are pushing the limits of AI and HPC, from data centers to