Brilliant, gifted, fabulously wealthy ...and in the dock
Two Scots brothers with the world at their feet... one jailed for drug dealing, the other facing trial over a £7.3bn Barclays deal
YOU had it all,’ US judge J Lawrence Irving told the Edinburgh University graduate before sending him to prison. ‘Brains, education, apparently in the upper 10 per cent academically of the British population…’
The list went on: ‘Great health and God-given fantastic athletic ability. Then enters greed and the whole thing seems to go down the toilet.’
Standing before him in the court in San Diego in 1988 was David Jenkins, a member of Britain’s Olympic silver medalwinning 400metre relay team in 1972 who was now exposed as the kingpin in an international steroid smuggling ring.
‘A substantial sentence is appropriate,’ said the judge. ‘Mr Jenkins, you have earned it.’
If David Jenkins had it all, then how might a judge characterise the prosperity of the athlete’s younger brother Roger?
Three years his sibling’s junior, the 61-year-old former Edinburgh Academy pupil was, for a time, Britain’s highest paid banker, earning between £40million and £75million a year. The superyacht-owning tax guru flitted between a mansion in Malibu and a townhouse in London’s Mayfair. So did his wife, a beautiful and charismatic Bosnian who effortlessly drew celebrity pals into their circle.
Even when their marriage ended – amicably and with mutual declarations of everlasting love – Jenkins was not lonely long. Soon he was sailing around the Med with new girlfriend Elle Macpherson. After that there was a fling with a former Miss Venezuela.
Oh, and Roger Jenkins did not miss out on the God-given athletic ability either. He was a star rugby player at school and represented Scotland in the 1974 Commonwealth Games.
Yet, like his older brother almost 30 years before him, he is heading for court. On July 3, he will take his place in the dock alongside the former chief executive of Barclays, John Varley, and two other former senior managers, Thomas Kalaris and Richard Boath.
And, if convicted on all the charges he faces, Roger Jenkins could go to prison for up to 22 years – considerably longer than the ten months his brother ended up serving in a penal facility in the Mojave Desert in the late 1980s.
Unlike his brother, however, the former tax division chief vehemently denies any wrongdoing and will ‘vigorously defend’ himself against the charges.
They relate to the financial crisis of 2008 in which several banks, including RBS, were taken under state control. Back then, as former RBS chief executive Fred Goodwin was denounced as the archetypal ‘casino’ banker, gambling billions on his programme of rapid expansionism, his fellow Scot Jenkins was feted by bankers at least as the man who saved Barclays from becoming taxpayer-owned.
BUT that multi-billion pound manoeuvre is now the subject of a series of charges brought by the Serious Fraud Office (SFO). In total, Barclays was able to raise £7.3billion from investors in the Middle East, including Qatar Holdings, a state-owned investment fund.
But the deal was later investigated when it emerged that £346million in fees had been paid to Qatar Holdings around the time of the fundraising. The payment, initially not disclosed by Barclays, was said to be for ‘advisory’ services. But the SFO has been probing whether or not these fees were an inducement to secure its investment. The four men are all accused of failing to properly disclose this payment to shareholders.
Jenkins and Varney are further accused of ‘unlawful financial assistance’ by providing Qatari investors with a £2.3 billion loan to buy Barclays shares – which, essentially, would amount to the bank lending to itself.
All four insist they are innocent. Jenkins’s US-based lawyer Brad Kaufman said this week: ‘As one might expect in the challenging circumstances of 2008, Mr Jenkins sought and received both internal and external legal advice on each and every topic covered by the SFO’s accusations.’
Perhaps the biggest surprise for those who encountered Roger Jenkins in the early days was that he would one day be linked – legally or illegally – with such vast sums of money.
He was seen in his early days as diligent but dull and, despite steady progress through the ranks after he joined Barclays in 1978, few people saw him as a future multi-millionaire. The middle of three brothers who all attended fee-paying Edinburgh Academy, Roger shone more brightly on the rugby field than in the classroom.
But, like his brothers David and Trevor, he benefited from the conscientious approach instilled in him by his mother Vera and father Arthur, an oil refinery manager in Grangemouth, Stirlingshire.
‘The whole family were very focused people,’ said Jake Young, a PE teacher to the brothers. ‘Arthur was a very successful man, Vera was more an intellectual type, and they were determined the boys would achieve.
‘Even though David and Roger were good at sport, they made sure the first thing they did every day on getting home was their homework. I wouldn’t say the boys were academic, but they were made to work at it.’
That got Roger to Heriot-Watt University, where he studied for a degree in economics while training regularly on the track at Edinburgh’s Meadowbank Stadium. After running in both the Commonwealth Games and the World Student Games in 1975 – where he took silver in the 400metres – he received the Team GB call-up the following year for the Olympics. Jaws dropped as he
turned it down. Mr Young recalled: ‘He asked if he would actually be running and was told they weren’t sure, so he said he had better things to do. He was a young man then and I think he had become more focused on his career.’
As a graduate trainee at Barclays he met his first wife, Catherine McDowell, and, by the early 1980s, was working for the bank’s investment arm in New York.
He left towards the end of the decade to join the merchant bank Kleinwort Benson but returned in 1994 to set up a group advising companies on risk management.
But it was not until years later – and a chance meeting at the Barbican gym in London – that Mr Jenkins’s career started to go stratospheric.
The young woman he encountered there, Sanela Dijana Catic, was a Bosnian refugee who had fled the Yugoslav war aged 20, landing in London speaking hardly any English.
He, by that time, was divorced, living in a rented apartment and had ‘nothing in the bank’ – circumstances both were keen to emphasise much later when they split up and he happily agreed to give her half his £300million fortune.
‘We built our fortune together from scratch so why shouldn’t she get half?’ said Jenkins in a bizarre joint interview with his by then estranged wife.
IAM not going to be one of those people who starts hiding all my money from her, not at all. She deserves half and half is what she shall get.’
Somehow Sanela – or Diana as she was now calling herself – completed this hitherto anonymous City worker. Even as they separated after 12 years of marriage, he said of her: ‘There is no way I would have achieved what I did in the City without her. Without her I would be nothing. Men don’t normally give credit to their wives. I do. She didn’t make me, but she complemented me. And I love her for that.’
Certainly his marriage found him at the peak of his powers. These were the ‘Roger the Dodger’ years – the nickname earned for his rare ability with tax arrangements which could save corporate clients fortunes.
Yet few demonised him as a stereotypical unscrupulous fat cat. That was because his wife used their growing wealth and her natural networking abilities to launch philanthropic ventures involving A-listers.
In organising events to raise money for Darfur and Haiti, she became friendly with both George Clooney and Brad Pitt. That led to the couple hosting celebrity parties attended by the likes of Sir Michael Caine, Scarlett Johansson and Bono.
His charming, garrulous wife appeared to wash his profession clean of all toxicity. And yet, as his earnings soared, he could hardly be accused of financial moderation. At team-building away days, he presided over poker matches where hundreds of thousands of pounds changed hands and staff were divided into ‘big boys’ and ‘babies’ tables.
He is said to have invested in a marble-floored yacht named Utopia, rented out for at least £300,000 a week. The Malibu pad, meanwhile, had a £25million price tag.
By the time he was promoted to head of Barclays investment banking and investment management in the Middle East it seemed he could do no wrong. Except, in 2008, the SFO alleges, he did.
Intriguingly, it was through Diana that Qatar Holdings’ chairman Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber al-Thani came into his orbit. She had met his wife on holiday in Sardinia and got chatting.
But the Middle East move, coupled with the turbulence of the financial crisis and Diana Jenkins’s growing belief in herself as a brand in her own right all contributed to the marriage’s undoing.
‘I love Roger. I always will. But I was tired of being “Mrs Roger Jenkins”, the wife of the man who saved Barclays,’ she said in 2011. ‘I want people to see me as me, not the wife of a rich financier.’
She had complained two years earlier of being seen as little more than an ‘Eastern European mail-order bride’ – when the reality, she and her husband clearly believed, is they were a powerful, highly effective team.
‘She is a woman who is incredibly loyal and faithful,’ said Jenkins of the mother of his two children. ‘But it was exhausting trying to carry on a long-distance relationship. We had a main house in Malibu that I put in Diana’s name. The kids were happy. I was in London on business and when I came back I would disrupt the household.’
So while she ran her new swimwear company, Avalon Fashions and her soft drinks firm, Neuro, he left Barclays and resurfaced as a managing partner at Brazilian investment bank BTG Pactual, where he had a share in the bank’s £11billion flotation.
He was also to be found, in the summer of 2012, off the coast of Ibiza in a motorboat with supermodel girlfriend Elle Macpherson.
‘Everybody’s super-happy,’ said a friend of his ex-wife. ‘Diana is thrilled that Roger has found happiness with Elle; we all thought she’d be cut up about it but she’d delighted. She really likes Elle and wants Roger to be happy.’
LITTLE wonder they billed it as the happiest divorce ever. Five years on, there are rather fewer public pronouncements on the moods of either, sunny or otherwise.
The relationship with Miss Macpherson fizzled out, as did his romance with former Miss Venezuela Aida Yespica. He is single now, according to friends, concentrating on his family and no longer in the employ of BTG Pactual.
Now 44, Diana Jenkins was last spotted in a black bikini in a boat off the coast of Ibiza, curiously enough. She was aboard the vessel with the singer James Blunt and his wife, Sofia Wellesley, 33 – and, judging from the snap which she posted on social media, appeared not to have a care in the world.
Who knows whether a similar life of untroubled luxury awaits her exhusband when his business with the law courts is concluded?
But few familiar with his family’s extraordinary story would be surprised if that were exactly what happens.
Not for long was his brother David the disgraced drug smuggler ex-con. Out in California, he went on to become a dizzyingly successful multi-millionaire entrepreneur.