NEW YORK—Former Barclays Plc Chief Operating Officer (COO) Jerry del Missier on Monday testified in front of Parliament’s Treasury Select Committee that his former boss, Bob Diamond, instructed him to low ball the bank’s Libor submissions, based on a conversation Diamond had with the Bank of England.
Del Missier recalled that at the time he believed the instruction was coming from Bank of England regulators who thought Barclays’s submissions were higher than other banks, thus raising questions of Barclays’s overall health.
He then passed the message on to the head of the money markets desk. Del Missier’s testimony differed from Diamond’s, who earlier testified that he did not instruct del Missier to lower the bank’s Libor submissions.
Del Missier admitted that he did not seek further guidance—either from legal or compliance—stating that those were extraordinary times for the banking industry.
Del Missier’s testimony also implicated other Barclays executives, including Stephen Morse, the bank’s compliance head, who del Missier says never acted to stop the false Libor submissions after del Missier told him about them.
