The dealmaker who’s suing Barclays for £1.6 BILLION
She’s the fixer who dated Prince Andrew and helped rescue a bank in 2008 crisis. Now Amanda Staveley is fighting for £1.6billion in fees
EVERY shelf, desk and tabletop in Amanda Staveley’s townhouse office in Mayfair, West London, is decorated like a shrine to the people who have helped catapult her to the very top of British business.
Alongside photos of her husband, children and wedding day are pictures of the glamorous financier with Sir Alex Ferguson and David Beckham.
Then there’ s the string of Middle Eastern sheiks including Manchester City football club owner Sheikh Man sour and Dubai’s ruling Maktoum family.
When it comes to celebrity friends and connections, Staveley is undoubtedly the City’s queen.
This, after all, is the woman who dated Prince Andrew for two years before going on to become the hotshot dealmaker behind the 2008 rescue of Barclays and the takeover of Manchester City by Abu Dhabi royal Sheikh Mansour.
Staveley is running late from a call with her latest investors when she rushes in, slips off her Dior stilettos and greets me with a hug. ‘I’m so sorry to keep you waiting, love,’ she says in her trademark gentle Yorkshire accent. ‘I just have to take off these heels, my back is killing me.’
No wonder Staveley has built up such a powerful network of contacts over the years; this is the first time we’ve met, but the warmth of her greeting seems so instinctive and genuine that, for a brief moment, it feels like we are old friends.
Staveley has agreed to talk to The Mail on Sunday ahead of a gigantic court case against Barclays bank that could finally explode into life this summer. The 46- year- old is suing for an astonishing £1.6 billion in fees that she claims to be owed from that high- profile rescue deal more than a decade ago.
At the time in October 2008, Barclays was struggling to stay afloat at the height of the financial crisis. It was just weeks after the collapse of the Wall Street giant Lehman Brothers; Lloyds had just stepped in to rescue HBOS; Northern Rock had gone bust; and Britain’s largest banks were close to accepting a £500 billion taxpayer bailout.
Bar clays was desperately searching for private investors to shore up its finances so it didn’t have to call on the Government for taxpayer cash.
Staveley saw an opportunity to put together a once-in-a-lifetime deal with her contacts in the Gulf and orchestrated a £ 3.5 billion investment into Barclays from Sheikh Man sour, pocketing £30 million for herself in fees.
But Staveley always felt sidelined, despite playing a critical role in securing the funding for Barclays. When she discovered several years later that a group of Qatari investors – who were also involved in the deal – scooped £346 million in fees, she was furious that they had received more than ten times her share of the spoils.
Staveley sued Barclays in 2016 after the Qatari payments emerged, but her court battle was delayed over fears it would compromise a separate fraud case against three Barclays bosses.
The Serious Fraud Office case collapsed spectacularly last month when Roger Jenkins, Thomas Kalaris and Richard Boath were cleared of allegations that they funnelled secret payments to the Qataris.
Now, finally, the path has been cleared for Staveley to have her day in court. The original claim of £720 million has spiralled due to mounting costs and interest.
‘It frustrates me that they have repeatedly delayed this trial,’ she says. ‘We just want people to see in detail what happened in this deal because there are so many details the SFO could not include in its case.’
Staveley wants to prove she played a critical role in the Barclays rescue, rather than just acting as a go-between who set up meetings between wealthy investors and the bank. She will argue she should have been paid the same amount in fees as the Qataris, and claims she can reveal explosive new details about wrongdoing at the bank. ‘ Barclays just desperately didn’t want to be in the hands of the Government back then,’ she says. ‘It was a terrifying experience because there was no other option for the bank. I knew the most important thing was securing the deal – and that’s what I did.’
Barclays said the claim was misconceived and that it would ‘vigorously’ defend itself.
One of the reasons Staveley has been so eager for the case to go ahead is her health. She suffers from Huntington’s disease, a degenerative genetic disorder that affects people later in life and for which there is no known cure. Once the disease starts taking effect, brain function slowly declines, culminating in symptoms similar to dementia.
Staveley discovered she had inherited the Huntington’s gene from her mother at the age of 37 when she decided to start a family and got tested. She has been told the disease is dormant but could be brought on by anxiety or intense pressure at work.
‘The stress brings on the onset of the disease, and the disease is fatal,’ she says. ‘It was a tough decision for the judge to delay my case and I was in bits when Barclays won a two-year delay in 2017. They want to delay until I give up.’
Staveley suffers from mood swings that affect her family life, and there are long periods where
‘Securing the deal was vital...so I did it’
she can’t sleep for more than three hours a night. She says: ‘I have the most incredibly patient and loving husband. I didn’t want to get married when I found out about the disease – but he said he didn’t care, and that we would find the best medical care available.’
Staveley says she has in fact exhibited signs of her Huntington’s disease throughout her life. She believes the disorder made her brilliant with numbers at a young age.
‘It’s actually very useful because I’ve never needed a calculator,’ she says breezily. ‘The Barclays guys were always shocked that I could do complicated financial models in my head. I thought I was just good with numbers – it turns out I was sick.’
She also says the disease means she has no ‘filter’ in social situations and laughs as she admits to embarrassing her husband with off-the-wall comments at parties.
It also means she can be strikingly familiar with strangers – as I discovered when she arrived for our interview. Staveley’s extraordinary success – both in academia and then in business – has come despite facing a string of adversities i n her personal l i fe. She attended Cambridge University at just 16 after completing her A-levels in a single year, but was forced to drop out due to illness and a series of family setbacks.
‘When I got to university my dad had a heart attack, my mum was very ill with Huntington’s, and I also had an eating disorder,’ she says. ‘I was educated at a girls private school – Queen Margaret’s in York – and I found being educated with men at university very tough. I had a psychologist, I was sectioned, my weight dropped and I didn’t know how to cope.’
It didn’t take long for Staveley to turn her misfortune on its head, however, persuading a bank manager to lend her £180,000 to buy a Cambridgeshire restaurant called Stocks – despite having no experience in the industry.
Nestled between Cambridge and Newmarket racecourse, the restaurant was a regular haunt for horse owners including the Maktoums, the Dubai ruling family who she got to know well.
Cambridge university continued to support her and even invested in her second business, a conference centre for Cambridge’s science park. It was through that venture t hat she met Prince Andrew, who visited the science park as UK trade ambassador with King Abdullah of Jordan in 2001.
Staveley struck up a two-year love affair with the Prince, who reportedly invited her to a dinner and asked her to marry him in 2003. She turned him down.
‘If I’d married him my independence would have disappeared,’ she explained to a newspaper many years ago. Since then, Prince Andrew’s stature in public life has taken a heavy hit over his friendship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
So it’s perhaps understandable that Staveley won’t be drawn into discussing those times or her friendship with the Queen’ s favourite son.
After parting with Andrew, Staveley set up her own firm, PCP Capital Partners, in 2005 and set about securing international deals for clients in Qatar and the UAE.
The company shot into the limelight in 2008 when Staveley landed the £210 million sale of Manchester City Football Club and the rescue deal for Barclays in the same year. She reveals she came under huge pressure from then-Barclays boss Roger Jenkins because so much was at stake.
‘Roger was telling me I’d be all over the newspapers as the woman who sank Barclays if I didn’t close this deal,’ she says.
‘ Later they would tell me I shouldn’t take too much credit, let the guys take the credit – you’re still young and you’ll get the chance to do other deals.’
Staveley has certainly remained one of the biggest names in the City.
But she still wants her £1.6 billion from Barclays.