How Jes Staley's gamble to save his reputation backfired
F or much of Jes Staley's more than four-decade career in international finance, his clean-cut reputation appeared to be beyond reproach.
Jamie Dimon, the Wall Street veteran who runs JP Morgan Chase and was Staley's boss at America's biggest bank, said 15 years ago that his former protege had 'impeccable character and integrity'. At the same time, a senior executive at one of the biggest pension funds in the United States described Staley as a man who eschewed 'innuendo'.
'There is no grey area,' Britt Harris, who was then chief investment officer of the Teacher Retirement System of Texas, said in a profile of Staley in 2010. 'He has a well-developed sense of right and wrong.'
He was lauded as 'a man of enormous integrity' in 2015 by John McFarlane, who was chairman of Barclays when Staley reached the peak of his career: the role of chief executive at the FTSE 100 bank.
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