Barclays shares plunge after boss Jes Staley hacks dividend in half

Jes Staley, the new boss of Barclays, has taken the axe not just to the bank’s African operations but also to its dividend.

Marking a change of pace from his predecessor Antony Jenkins who was ousted last July, Staley, who joined in December, said: “We are accelerating the simplification of this business. We are creating a transatlantic consumer, corporate and investment bank anchored in the two financial centres of the world.”

Barclays shares dropped as much as 11% and trading was briefly halted on the stock market after it said it will slash its dividend from 6.5p a share to 3p for the next two years.

It also added its 62% of Barclays Africa, its Asian wealth management business and its southern European Barclaycard operations to the list of divisions up for sale.

Staley said the sale of those concerns, each of which is worth several billion pounds, would ensure Barclays did not need to raise fresh capital and result in “some pretty attractive numbers for us to pay a robust dividend”.

Today’s full-year numbers were worse than analysts had been expecting with Barclays reporting a headline 2% fall in profits to £5.4 billion on income of £24.5 billion, down 5%.

They included an extra £1.45 billion charge for PPI mis-selling in the final quarter as, like other banks, Barclays took into account higher claims ahead of a likely 2018 cut off.

Barclays also unveiled its plan for ring-fencing which, after months of heated discussion, seem to have been cleared by the Bank of England.

This will result in the creation of Barclays UK — with retail, SME customers and Barclaycard UK — which will have assets of some £95 billion and Barclays Corporate and Investment, with assets of some £195 billion.