Sexist bankers branded top City financier ‘ a tart and a dolly bird’
BARCLAYS BOSSES EXPOSED IN £1.6bn HIGH COURT CASE
BARCLAYS bosses referred to financier Amanda Staveley as a ‘dolly bird’ and a ‘tart’ as the bank negotiated a crucial deal during the 2008 crisis, the High Court has heard.
The telephone conversation between Roger Jenkins and Richard Boath, both then Barclays executives, was revealed as Ms Staveley launched a legal battle to sue the bank for £1.6billion.
Transcripts of the October 2008 call revealed Mr Boath said: ‘Yes. Now, that dolly bird that represents – is it – what’s her name?’
Mr Jenkins replied: ‘Amanda Staveley.’ Later in the call, Mr Jenkins said: ‘Well I am – you know, I’m going to call the tart; I was going to call the tart.’
Mr Boath asked: ‘Who’s the tart?’ to which Mr Jenkins replied: ‘Amanda.’
Ms Staveley, 47, who in recent months has been involved in brokering a deal which could see a Saudi consortium take control of Newcastle United, says her firm – PCP Capital Partners – introduced Manchester City owner Sheikh Mansour to Barclays during the finan
‘That dolly bird that represents – is it – what’s her name?’ ‘Amanda Staveley’
cial crisis and he ‘subscribed’ to invest £3.25billion as part of an £11billion emergency fundraising.
She claims Barclays secretly offered better terms to Qatari investors, which meant PCP missed out on higher advisory fees than the £30m it received. She says PCP is owed money for the work it did.
Barclays disputes PCP’s claim and says it is made ‘of sand’.
Roger Jenkins, a former boyfriend of supermodel Elle Macpherson, said, as far as he knew, Ms Staveley had ‘no qualifications in finance’.
‘Ms Staveley, as leader of PCP, had received some publicity by 2008 for her role in brokering the Abu Dhabi investment in a major English football club (Manchester City), but she was a complete unknown in terms of large, complex, public market transactions of the kind we were undertaking,’ Mr
Jenkins, then Barclays executive chair of Middle East business, told Mr Justice Waksman in a statement.
‘So far as I knew at the time PCP did not employ experienced analysts familiar with the finance sector and Ms Staveley herself had no qualifications in finance.’
He added: ‘I was aware that she had once owned a restaurant by a racecourse and that was how she had made connections with Middle
Eastern individuals.’
Mr Jenkins said he had assumed Barclays would deal directly with Sheikh Mansour and did not expect PCP ‘to be acting as a principal, or as a prospective investor in its own right’. He said his impression was that Ms Staveley was seeking to use the deal to ‘generate publicity for herself’ – an idea he said was strengthened by her turning up for one early- morning meeting with a photographer. The trial continues.