Barclays on Tuesday faced renewed shareholder anger despite efforts to head off a shareholder revolt over its plans to raise more than £7bn in fresh capital from Middle Eastern investors, as UK chancellor Alistair Darling warned bank shareholders they should not expect favourable treatment from the government if they tried to change the terms of their bail-out. Barclays announced a limited retreat on elements of its plan to raise capital from Qatar Holding and Sheikh Mansour Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, a member of Abu Dhabi’s royal family. The UK bank offered investors the opportunity to claw back £500m in securities yielding 14% that it is proposing to issue to the Gulf investors, and said the whole board would be put up for re-election in April. It also followed the lead of Goldman Sachs and UBS by announcing its top executives would waive their 2008 bonuses. Barclays was forced to act after key investors – including Legal & General, which has a stake of more than 5%, and Aviva Investors, with 1% – threatened to vote against the capital raising at next week’s shareholder meeting.
