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The former Barclays chief executive Jes Staley has lost a legal challenge against the UK financial regulator, leaving him banned from the City for life for misleading the watchdog over his relationship with the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
The ruling, handed down by the upper tribunal judge Tim Herrington, said: “We agree with the [Financial Conduct] Authority (FCA) that Mr Staley’s breaches of the authority’s rules represented a serious failure of judgment by Mr Staley.
“Bearing in mind the importance of Barclays as a financial institution, this was conduct that could have resulted in confidence in the financial system being adversely affected.”
The case centred on a letter that Barclays sent to the FCA in 2019, which stated that Staley “did not have a close relationship” with Epstein and that his last contact with the financier was “well before” he joined Barclays four years earlier in 2015.
However, a subsequent investigation by the FCA – triggered by a cache of 1,200 emails from Staley’s former employer JP Morgan – concluded that the pair were “indeed close” and had a relationship that “went beyond one that was professional in nature”.
Staley, 68, appealed against the decision at the upper tribunal, leading to a two-week hearing in March during which high-profile figures, including the Barclays chair, Nigel Higgins, and the Bank of England governor, Andrew Bailey, appeared in the witness box. The American banker himself faced almost four days of questioning.
The tribunal raised concerns about Staley’s evidence in its ruling, saying that the former Barclays chief executive “could be inconsistent in his answers when he felt that it would suit his case”.
The ruling said: “Although we do not consider that Mr Staley sought deliberately to mislead the tribunal we have found that some of his evidence lacked credibility. There were occasions on which he did not do his best to assist the tribunal in his answers.”
The tribunal added that Staley had “shown no remorse for his conduct which has led to the authority’s investigation”.
This included discrepancies around how he described his relationship with Epstein, their contact after the financier was convicted and jailed in 2008 for procuring underage girls for sex, and the extent to which he was surprised by Epstein’s arrest in 2019. Epstein died in prison shortly after his arrest, while awaiting trial for trafficking underage girls for sex.
Staley resigned from Barclays in 2021 over preliminary findings from the FCA’s investigation. He was eventually banned from the City, and originally issued with a £1.8m fine when the regulator gave its final decision in 2023. He also lost out on £18m worth of pay and bonuses from Barclays as a result of the ruling.
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The upper tribunal reduced Staley’s £1.8m fine to £1.1m in light of his lost pay from Barclays. However, it ruled in the FCA’s favour, meaning Staley’s ban from holding a senior management role in the financial services industry was upheld.
The City watchdog’s joint director of enforcement, Therese Chambers, said: “Mr Staley chose to take a calculated risk that we would take his inaccurate account of his relationship with Mr Epstein at face value. He hoped that the truth would never come to light and that he would get away with it. Such a serious lack of integrity flies in the face of the requirements we place on those at the top.
“The tribunal’s decision shows that we can and will act to protect the financial system by holding those in senior roles to the high standards required of them.”
Staley has 14 days to appeal against the decision to the supreme court. His lawyers did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
