Barclays caves to investor demands over £7bn funding

amcluesent

Barclays this morning moved to calm investor anger over its £7 billion capital-raising plan by offering existing shareholders a small £500 million slice of the deal.

"The British bank also said today that its entire board would "exceptionally offer themselves" for re-election in April next year, and confirmed that its executive directors would not be paid any bonuses for 2008.

Barclays said this morning that Qatar Holding LLC, which is investing £2.3 billion in the UK bank, and Sheikh Mansour Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who is injecting £3.5 billion, would each make up to £250 million of reserve capital instruments available to existing shareholders."

As this letting shareholders get crumbs from the table or have the Oil Sheiks got some funding wobbles of their own and can't eat the elephant?

Reaper

As Peston puts it:

But gallingly for UK Investment institutions, they're not being offered any highly valuable and desirable warrants to buy Barclays shares: no warrants are being released by Qatar or Abu Dhabi. Some will argue therefore that the claw back for British pension funds and other investors of the £500m represents Abu Dhabi and Qatar getting an even better return for taking even less risk.

As I see it the Arabs want the lucrative deal to go through so are letting the British investors have some of the the less desirable crumbs.

I wouldn't vote for the deal if I was a Barclays shareholder.

blackswan2

Me neither, crap self-interested board they have.