Leonid Bershidsky, Columnist

Punishing Barclays for 2008 Would Be Strange Justice

The team that saved a big bank at no cost to the British taxpayer is somehow the only one being flogged.

June 20, 2017 at 6:31 PM UTC

Leonid Bershidsky, formerly Bloomberg Opinion’s Europe columnist, is a member of the Bloomberg News Automation Team. He recently published Russian translations of George Orwell’s “1984” and Franz Kafka’s “The Trial.”

The letter of the law.
Photographer: Leon Neal/AFP/Getty Images

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It was surprising that, until Tuesday, no top executives from too-big-to-fail banks in the U.S. or the U.K. had been charged with any crimes related to the 2008 financial crisis. It is ironic that the only ones to be charged today are the former top managers of Barclays -- a team that avoided a government bailout and saved the bank at no cost to the taxpayer.

It seems it is not what they did -- it's how they allegedly did it, according to U.K. prosecutors. The terms of Barclays' side deals with Qatar, which bailed out the bank, were allegedly illegal. At a time when Qatar is being boycotted by its neighbors, this has implications for the Gulf state as well as for Barclays.