Jerry del Missier, the former chief operating officer of Barclays, has hired a team of Morrison & Foerster attorneys to represent him in connection with investigations in both the United States and the United Kingdom into allegations of LIBOR rate-fixing at the British banking giant.
Del Missier, who resigned his Barclays post earlier this month, testified Monday in front of a U.K. parliamentary Treasury Select Committee probing the mushrooming LIBOR scandal. Appearing with him during the testimony were MoFo New York litigation partners Carl Loewenson Jr. and James Hough, as well as London-based regulatory partner Kevin Roberts, according to a firm spokesman.
Loewenson is cochair of MoFo’s securities litigation, enforcement, and white-collar defense group.
The Am Law Daily reported last week that lawyers from Sullivan & Cromwell, Clifford Chance, Norton Rose, and Dechert are advising either Barclays or former CEO Robert Diamond Jr., in connection with the ongoing probes. Barclays paid a combined total of nearly $453 million last month to settle charges in the U.S. and U.K. that the bank manipulated the London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR) and falsely reported derivatives trading positions, according to sibling publication The Am Law Litigation Daily. (LIBOR is the average interest rate banks use when extending credit, and can affect the rates paid on everything from small business loans to individuals’ credit card balances.
After the settlement, British Prime Minister David Cameron commissioned a full parliamentary inquiry into alleged rate-rigging by the country’s major banks. Diamond and current Barclays chairman Marcus Agius had testified prior to del Missier’s Monday appearance.
Singled out as the executive responsible for giving the order to lower the bank’s LIBOR submissions, del Missier has been at the center of the scandal from the start. During his Monday testimony, the former COO maintained that his actions were the result of a misinterpretation of a 2008 e-mail from Diamond regarding a conversation the then CEO had with Bank of England deputy governor Paul Tucker. Del Missier testified that he misunderstood the information Diamond was relaying from Tucker and believed he was acting under the direction of the Bank of England when he gave the order to submit false rates, according to Forbes.
Del Missier also named Barclays’s former global head of compliance, Stephen Morse, and Mark Dearlove, current head of global collateral and liquidity, as being complicit in his order to report false LIBOR rates. According to Financial News, del Missier testified that the two executives were aware of the order but failed to act.
As The Am Law Daily noted last week, bankers involved in the rate-rigging scandal could face criminal charges. The U.K.’s Serious Fraud Office is contemplating bringing prosecutions, Forbes adds, with the other banks under investigation including JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, HSBC, UBS, Credit Suisse, and Lloyds Banking Group. Meanwhile, the criminal division of the U.S. Department of Justice is reportedly in the process of building cases against employees of Barclays and other financial institutions, according to The New York Times.
