Barclays parts with CEO Antony Jenkins

The chief executive of Barclays, Antony Jenkins, is stepping down, the UK bank announced on Wednesday. The board says new leadership was necessary to take the bank forward.

Deutsche Welle, 8 July 2015

In a statement published on Wednesday, the bank said that "a new set of skills were required for the period ahead" and that the bank needed "to be much more focused on what is attractive, what we are good at, and where we are good at it."

Chairman John McFarlane would act as interim CEO until a replacement for Jenkins, who had led the bank since 2012, could be found, the bank said.

In the statement, Barclays' management stresses that the bank had to "improve revenue, costs and capital performance."

"We also need to become more externally focused and deal with the internal bureaucracy by becoming leaner and more agile," it added.

But the bank said the change of leadership would not equate to a change in strategy at the bank.

Jenkins, who succeeded Bob Diamond - himself forced to resign after the Libor rate-fixing scandal - had been trying to restore the bank's reputation after it was fined £290 million ($447 million, 391 million euros) by British and US regulators in 2012 for attempted manipulation of Libor and Euribor interbank rates in 2005 and 2009.

The bank was also embroiled in a foreign exchange rigging scheme. Six major global banks, including Barclays and British peer Royal Bank of Scotland, were fined a total of almost $6 billion.

ng/jil (Reuters, AFP)

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