Barclays’ new head gardener

Judi Bevan

3 March 2007

We are taking tea in his vast corner office on the 31st floor of Barclays’ tower in Canary Wharf. Despite his enthusiasm, Agius is well aware that Britain’s third-largest bank is at the centre of a storm about banks making huge profits from credit-card charges and penalty fees on unauthorised overdrafts. Outraged customers (of all the high-street banks, not just Barclays) were complaining to the Financial Ombudsman at the rate of 5,000 a day last week, and one tabloid greeted Barclays’ full-year profits of £7.1 billion with the headline ‘Barclays’ £7 billion bank robbery’ — even though only £1.2 billion of that came from UK retail customers.

Less than two months into the job, Agius is too smart to be drawn into the debate, leaving the question of Barclays’ commitment to free current-account banking to John Varley, his chief executive. ‘Retail banking is highly competitive and that keeps us alive and relevant,’ says Agius diplomatically. He also brushes aside reports of clashes between the very English Varley and the very American Bob Diamond, head of Barclays Capital. ‘What I saw at the results presentation was a team in operation. They all recognised their interdependence — there is a fantastic esprit de corps.’

Moving to Barclays is a quantum leap for one of the City’s most steady souls. In his speech at Agius’s leaving party at Lazard before Christmas, Nicholas Jones, his colleague of 20 years, remarked drily, ‘Until Marcus moved house last year he was the only man I knew who had owned the same house, worked for the same company and had the same wife for 33 years.’

Yet in other ways change has been a constant feature. The bull market was raging when he joined Lazard Brothers in 1972, but it swiftly ended and the secondary banking crisis almost brought the house down. ‘Everything I touched in the first two years turned to dust,’ he says. Back in the 1970s merchant banking was something of a cottage industry, its advisory activities strictly separated from lending and share trading. Then came Big Bang in 1986, followed by the invasion of Americans and Europeans who snapped up British stockbrokers and banks at absurd prices.

Lazard stayed aloof from the turmoil, protected by its partnership structure and its majority ownership by Pearson, which sold out in 2000. But he and his colleagues still had to compete with integrated securities houses such as Goldman Sachs and face an advancing tide of regulation and market complexity — not to mention four bull and bear cycles. Throughout it all, Agius helped keep Lazard near the top of the mergers and acquisitions league. He became chairman of the London arm in 2001. Lazard floated in 2005, allowing Agius and his partners to sell their shares.