Hearing before the Treasury Committee of the British Parliament for Bob Diamond, the former CEO of Barclays who resigned yesterday over the scandal over the manipulation of the Libor which has engulfed the English institution but which involves other world banks (none Italian or Spanish).
What did Diamond know about the Libor manipulation? In the hearing, the powerful former CEO admitted "mistakes" and "reprehensible behavior" within the group. He claimed to have resigned to help the bank: “attention has focused on my leadership – he said – and the support of the regulators has not been as strong as in the past. So to help Barclays I've decided to resign." Diamond later said he discovered "just this month" that the bank's Libor values had been lowered. “When I read the emails exchanged with traders, I was physically ill. There is no excuse for that behavior. It's wrong and I'm sorry,” he commented.
Central to the hearing is a telephone conversation in 2008 with the Deputy Governor of the Bank of England, Paul Tucker. Diamond in a 2008 note, published today in a document by Barclays, said that on October 29, 2008, he spoke with Tucker who told him it wasn't always necessarily the case that Barclays was as high on the Libor rate as it had recently been. Tucker reportedly told Diamond that even senior government officials were wondering why Barclays was reporting higher rates than other banks. Conversation that Diamond would later refer to Jerry del Missier, at the time senior manager of Barclays Capital in New York, who misunderstanding Diamond would have understood that it was the Central Bank that had asked Barclays to keep its rate reporting at a lower level .
With yellow in the yellow: first Barclays said it was in possession of a recording of the offending phone call, then the same bank retracted claiming it did not possess the recording.
