Finally! A Senior Financial Executive Is Charged In 2008 Crisis

We are nearly a decade past the financial collapse of 2008. And, as time has passed, it has become clear that one of the critical errors of the Obama administration was to forgo hauling the senior executives of the major Wall Street firms that taxpayers were forced to bail out into court and throwing the book at them. Even if the cases eventually came to naught, it would have been an important signal to the rest of the country and probably would have helped Hillary Clinton win the 2016 election.

But finally the senior executives at one financial firm are at last being charged. The problem is that it is happening over in the UK, where the senior executives at Barclays in 2008 are being charged with conspiracy to commit fraud. Unfortunately, the fraud accusations have nothing to do with what actually precipitated the financial crisis, but are related to the financing that Barclays desperately needed to avoid a bailout and received from the government of Qatar.

In June and October of 2008, Barclays received investments from both Qatar Holding and Challenger Universal, an entity set up by Sheikh Hamad Bin Jassim Bin Jabr Al-Thani and his family. In addition to these investments, there was also an apparently undisclosed agreement to pay the Qatar Investment Authority for “advisory services”. Subsequently, in November of 2008, Barclays loaned around $3 billion to the State of Qatar.

The fraud charges relate to these transactions and the accused are Barclays itself, along with the chief executive at that time, John Varley, and three other senior executives. Just to show that the leadership at the top of the bank hasn’t really improved in their adherence to the law, the current chief executive of the bank, Jes Staley, is currently under investigation for his efforts to unmask a whistleblower in the bank. In finance, nothing really changes, just the name of the criminals at the top.