Top Barclays man pledged shares to get private loan

Frits Seegers, the head of retail banking at Barclays admitted today — one day before the end of a Financial Services Authority "come clean" amnesty — that he pledged £6 million of Barclays stock in 2007 to raise funds.

A Barclays statement said Seegers "granted a third-party bank security over 896,364 shares". It has not been disclosed formally what Seegers did with the money raised from pledge. The third party has been identified as Citigroup, Seegers' former employer.

A spokesman for Barclays said the stock was used to raise money to buy 140,000 more shares in Barclays at a cost of £1 million. It is uncertain whether Seegers was forced to pledge the entire 896,364 shares to raise the £1 million or whether he pocketed substantial sums as part of the transaction.

What is apparent is he has lost hugely on the deal. The shares were bought at 680p. Today Barclays' bombed-out stock was trading at less than tenth of that, down 2.5p at 63.6p.

News of Seegers' admission comes amid more revelations of such deals, with Richard Harpin the boss of fast-growing emergency plumbing group Homeserve disclosing he has pledged a whopping £62 million of shares as security against personal loans.

The FSA offered a one-month amnesty on such deals after the issue exploded last month when Carphone Warehouse chairman David Ross lost his job, having admitted he offered £120 million as collateral to shore up his private property interests.

Since then, Icap boss Michael Spencer and Stagecoach chief executive Brian Souter have admitted pledging huge sums.

Barclays was today embroiled in a separate furore after its new Middle Eastern masters appeared to issue a "hands off" warning to any British Government plans to part-nationalise the High Street bank.

With shares in Barclays under severe pressure since Gordon Brown's second banking-industry bailout earlier this week, there has been increasing talk the bank will have to be rescued and part-nationalised by the Government.

But Barclays' new 32% owners, the Abu Dhabi royal family and Qatari government investment funds, appear to be behind the release of detail of documentation which reveals that if the UK Government were to make a move, it would trigger a clause which would not only deliver the bank into the hands of the Middle Easterners but also stipulates that the taxpayer would have to pay way over the current price for the new shares in the bank.

The detail of the deal brokered by British financier Amanda Staveley for the Middle East consortium fronted by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, states: "If Barclays does have to issue new shares at a price which is, for example, half our agreed price, then you automatically get twice as many shares for the money you have already invested.

"If this provision comes into effect, you could end up owning significantly more of Barclays at no extra cost."