Yup this happens too and in this case it was an article that Bloomberg showed its paying customers. I am not one of them. As such I am attaching the image that made me laugh.
I saw it about 8-10 hours ago and it had me rolling with laughter. So what gives? First the setting of ‘Consider Re-entering’ as I see it Barclays and other banks are strapped for capital and bleeding a client dry (service fees and commissions) is a tell tale story towards any bank trying to make a living. There is no consideration, there is merely the trap they put themselves in 10 years ago. As for the “capitalise on the kingdom’s growing need to access capital markets” is even more hilarious. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has options to consider HSBC, JP Morgan, Bank of America and the 5 largest banks in China. All stronger and more able than Barclays. There is also Credit Agricole and the Citigroup. All in the top 12, Barclays stands at 18. So there is the first part. In addition I can hand you Rothschild & Co. The one bank no one mentions. It’s value was around €18.1 billion a year ago, as such I reckon it is pushing well over €20 billion at present. Barclays has nowhere near that capital or those connections. I reckon that Rothschild can access around 20% more clients than Barclays can (a casual speculation by little old me).
So why this action?
Well it started in 2012 when we were given “Barclays is fined for manipulating the benchmark Libor interest rate in 2012, after revelations stretching back to 2005” It’s CEO C. S. Venkatakrishnan didn’t forget about that, did he? Then we get 2014 when Reuters gave us ‘Barclays sued by Saudi developer for $10 billion’, so how did that end? We got “A Saudi real estate company has sued Barclays for $10 billion (6.24 billion pounds), claiming the bank ceased pursuing lease payments due from the Saudi government on military complexes in the kingdom in order to obtain a lucrative banking license there” when we were given (source: Reuters) “The company, Jadawel International, a unit of London-based MBI International Holdings Inc., claims Barclays “hatched a fraudulent scheme” to secure the rare Saudi banking license, selling out Jadawel in the process, according to the lawsuit filed in New York state Supreme Court on Tuesday” One says potato and the other claims tomato. In the end as far as I can tell Barclays won the dismissal. It doesn’t make them innocent, but the claimant could not prove guilt (as far as I can tell). And last but not least only this year we were given that Barclay was one of the players in getting Andrea Orcel “derivatives linked to Commerzbank for the Italian lender in the weeks before Berlin sold a stake earlier this month, sources familiar with the matter said. Barclays and Bank of America subsequently helped Orcel to effectively expand UniCredit’s holding in Commerzbank to the current level of about 21 per cent, they said asking not to be named discussing the private information” now, this last bit does not seem to be illegal, but the stakes against Barclay (all over Europe) are increasingly high and now they hope that Saudi Arabia gives them a chunk of business before they are forced to hand over their bank to any of the upper 15 banks. I say good luck to them. Yes there is all kinds of banking issues I am not familiar with, but governments need to work with banks that are cleaner then clean and as such I am entertaining howls of deriving laughter if Barclay thinks they are that. The LIBOR scandal took care of that.
And lets be clear Barclay didn’t (as far as I know) hand the statement “Mistakes were made in the past and we have sanitised our structures and people to meet the challenge that a customer the size of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia brings”, nope, none of that. We were given “Barclay plc is considering re-entering Saudi Arabia as it looks to capitalise on the kingdom’s growing need to access capital markets”. I actually wonder if they would be allowed in the country at present. There are seemingly better viable candidates and that is before you consider Rothschild as a contender.
I get it. I also tried to access Saudi Arabia as a partner (read: future owner) of my IP. I merely wanted 50 million, a Canadian passport and 2% of the revenue for 20 years. With my believe (a presented believe) that the idea would give them 6 billion annual and their investment to that would be 50 million (for happy old me). And this is about as decent as it gets. A mere 0.8% risk and that is at the time of the presentation. A mere trivial amount and I feel certain that this would have worked. There was one condition Microsoft was not allowed near it. Amazon would be OK, but Microsoft is a no go.
This is why I contacted Kingdom Holdings and Tencent Technology as well. They can drive the innovation I brought. As such I feel a stronger contender than Barclay ever could be (Yes, I am blowing my own horn).
So as I see it, re-entering a market when the others have seemingly had enough of you isn’t re-entering. It is running for the hills to avoid being taken over. But I am not a banking person, so what do I know.
Have a fun day.
Lawrence van Rijn - Law Lord to be 