£75m a year ladies’ man who revelled in the celebrity life
IN appearance, Roger Jenkins may have resembled a ‘shire counties branch manager’, as one associate described him, but he enjoyed the salary and private life of a Hollywood mogul.
In 2005 he was Britain’s highest paid banker, earning a reported £75million as head of a controversial Barclays corporate tax advice business. He also had a much younger and very glamorous second wife and later dated the supermodel Elle Macpherson and a Miss Venezuela. At a Mayfair mansion he once hosted a soiree to raise £10million for Darfur refugees. The guest list included Matt Damon, Sir Michael Caine, Bono and Scarlett Johansson. And Mr Jenkins wasn’t even the boss of the bank he joined as a graduate trainee.
The 61-year-old Scot has always been a competitor. At Edinburgh Academy he was a star rugby player and excelled at athletics, representing Scotland at the 1974 Commonwealth games.
His older brother David was an Olympic 400-metre runner but was later jailed in the US for trafficking tens of millions of pounds worth of anabolic steroids.
Roger Jenkins joined Barclays after studying economics at Heriot-Watt University. He was not an obvious high flyer – reserved and unflamboyant rather than a Caledonian Gordon Gekko, the financier played by Michael Douglas in the film Wall Street.
Two events changed his life. The first was his part in developing the bank’s Structured Capital Market division – described by a whistleblower as a ‘tax avoidance factory’ – the success of which earned him his eight-figure income.
The second was meeting a beautiful Bosnian refugee, 16 years his junior, at a City gym. Sanela Dijana Catic was from a Muslim family from close to Sarajevo, and fled the Yugoslav civil war aged 20.
She would later say: ‘It was perhaps more instant attraction for him than me. What people don’t understand is that Roger really was nobody when we met.
‘He was not this very wealthy man. He was my first friend in England really.’
Before then she had struggled to make a living while reading computer science at City University.
In 1999 Miss Catic became Mrs Diana Jenkins – and she proved very adept at spending her husband’s money and making famous friends. The couple became a fixture on London’s A-List philanthropic social scene.
Mr Jenkins’s success at the tax division led to his promotion to head of Barclays’s investment banking and investment management in the Middle East.
With her networking skills, Mrs Jenkins was credited with securing contacts with the Qatari royal family which led to the deal to bail out Barclays in 2008. The Bosnian refugee had saved the British bank – or so it seemed.
In 2009 Mr Jenkins announced the marriage had reached its ‘natural end’. He left the bank to spend more time with their two children. The couple divorced in 2012, with a reported settlement of £150million. ‘Without her, I would not have anything like the success I’ve had,’ he said.