Jes Staley had had enough. He told Barclays chairman Nigel Higgins he was considering resigning from his role as chief executive of the British lender.
It was December 2019. Staley had learnt that the UK financial regulator, which had received a trove of emails from his former employer JPMorgan Chase, would launch an investigation into whether he had misled Barclays and the Financial Conduct Authority about his relationship with convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein, who had died by suicide in a prison cell four months earlier.
