Not a “monster” bank as has been described by some. Certainly not from my personal experience.

Throughout all my student days in London there was nothing Barclays Bank wouldn’t do to help me contact the institutions in the City that I wanted to interview in connection with my research work in business finance. Its frequent interventions were something I remain grateful for even today, several years after my last encounter with its Malta representative at Portomaso before its office was closed.

I was then asked if I thought the government would do with Bank of Valletta as it had done with Mid-Med Bank. My reply shocked them: BoV is the only Maltese bank left and, even if the government were to sell its shares, these should go only to Maltese citizens.

Barclays could not conceivably have acted alone in fraudulently manipulating the Libor (London Interbank Offered Rate); some 250 “benchmark”/”reference” rates are used for hundreds of trillions of dollars in over-the-counter swaps, loans, eurodollar and derivative contracts worldwide. The Libor rate is calculated daily at 11 a.m. in London and handed to Thomson Reuters by a panel of 18 big banks, each declaring what it would cost them to borrow from other banks. Reuters throws out the highest four and the lowest four entries, leaving only the middle 10 for averaging.

Barclays acting alone?