Street Peers: Bank and Meeting Minutes

street peers: Agius, wearing a dark grey suit and blue tie, was questioned by the Serious Fraud Office's lead prosecutors for nearly five hours over the bank's 11bn emergency fundraising in 2008, according to The Independent. Lead prosecutor Edward Brown QC asked the former chairman to provide details about a board meeting held in early October that year, just as the UK government was preparing to bail out Barclays' high street peers Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds TSB. According to meeting minutes read to the jury, the board discussed whether Barclays should take the government up on an offer of a fresh capital injection, but was worried about constraints placed on the bank particularly around its operations, ability to issue dividends and the level of executive compensation . Agius said at the time, there was a fantastic level of competition for bankers, whose pay had crept higher over a 10-15 year period. Marcus Agius is the first senior Barclays board member to be questioned during the trial at Southwark crown court in central London. The prospect of pay cuts meant risking the bank's top-level talent, he explained. The SFO alleges that four former Barclays executives Richard Boath, Roger Jenkins, Tom Kalaris and former CEO John Varley lied to the stock market and other investors about how 322m in fees were paid to Qatar in relation to emergency fundraising of more than 11bn in 2008. The board was facing a problem, that if we didn't pay people the going market rate very highly paid, highly talented people walked out . We concluded that if our major shareholder was the government, our ability to pay our people competitive rates in order to obtain their services would be compromised, Agius said. (news.financializer.com). As reported in the news.