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Investing.com – ADRs of Barclays (NYSE:BCS) fell 1.7% in Monday’s premarket trading as Chief Executive Officer Jes Staley stepped down following a probe by British regulators into his ties with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
C.S. Venkatakrishnan, head of global markets, will take over as chief executive immediately, the bank said.
Epstein was arrested in the summer of 2019 and killed himself in August the same year while awaiting trial on sex trafficking offences.
In a statement to the stock exchange, Barclays said it had become aware of the joint investigation’s preliminary conclusions regarding what Staley told the bank about his association with Epstein, a version of events that the bank had in turn passed on to the regulator largely unchanged.
Staley plans to contest the conclusions.
“It should be noted that the investigation makes no findings that Mr Staley saw, or was aware of, any of Mr Epstein’s alleged crimes, which was the central question underpinning Barclays’ support for Mr Staley,” Barclays said in its statement.
According to a report by the Financial Times last year, U.K. regulators began to probe Staley’s links with Epstein after JPMorgan (NYSE:JPM) provided them with emails the two exchanged when he was the head of its private bank. Staley became Barclays CEO in December 2015. Other reports indicated that Staley had visited Epstein’s private island earlier that year, pointing to a social relationship that lasted far past the end of their initial business relationship.
