Barclays is, ending its physical presence in Gibraltar after 127 years and leaving its last 16 locally-resident employees out of a job.
The decision had been widely anticipated and will have little practical impact on local consumers, as the bank had already wound down the parts of its business that dealt with the Gibraltar market, but it deals a heavy blow to a skeleton staff that had committed to help Barclays retain a small presence on the Rock, and who now face an uncertain future.
Yesterday, the government issued a stern reaction: “Barclays is principally letting them and their families down after many of them will have decided, or been forced, to stay with the bank at the time of its withdrawal from the retail banking sector in Gibraltar.”
The bank’s move was also slammed by Unite, which said the closure would hit employees hard and leave local residents and businesses “high and dry”. The union called on Barclays to reconsider the decision, which comes less than a year after the closure of the bank's Main St retail branch.
Barclays has been winding down its operations in Gibraltar since 2014, but had retained 14 permanent staff + 2 contract workers to run a small operation focused on large companies and the super-wealthy, but that office will be closed, in the coming months, as part of a “strategic restructuring and simplification” of the Barclays Group that will also impact on its presence in Cyprus. [AND IBERIA]
The majority of Barclays’ clients in Gibraltar have bank accounts based in London and Jersey and will continue to receive banking services, the bank said. “The only change is that the relationship point will now come from a team based in London, operating on a ‘fly in’ basis as required,” the bank’s vice-president for 'government' relations, Theo Leonard, said in an e-mail sent to 'officials' in Gibraltar.
Employees in Gibraltar were informed of the development early yesterday morning, ahead of a public announcement.
Comments
Far more important is the ECB's forthcoming actions to start penalising countries with 'zombie banks', Ones carrying far too much debt to begin lending to businesses and thereby help grow their economies. Keeping as always the focus on all Portugal's banks, which are rated as rubbish investments so fit the zombie definition and in a day or so the country itself may also be rubbished by the DBRS ratings ......
DBRS cannot fail to be dismayed by the idiotically weak Plan B announced by the PM Costa yesterday. The current Plan A being un-ravelling all the IMF good sense actions and keeping the Portuguese public sector and its payroll costing Portugal an extra 8 billion euros public debt a year. Each year.
The previously unplanned Plan B being putting austerity back into the limelight. But only theoretically !