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George Clooney banks £10m for Darfur
Robert Mendick and Rashid Razaq05.12.08
George Clooney raised an astonishing £10 million for the victims of Darfur hosting a fund-raising party at the Mayfair home of one of the City's highest earners.
The Hollywood actor joined forces with Roger Jenkins, a senior executive at Barclays, for an event at which the 100 guests were charged as much as £10,000 a ticket.
Guests included Clooney's best friend Matt Damon as well as Scarlett Johansson, Cindy Crawford, Sarah Ferguson and Guy Ritchie. Clooney and Jenkins may seem at first glance an odd couple. The American is one of Hollywood's biggest stars with a penchant for liberal good causes and a playboy image.
Jenkins, 52, chairman of Barclays investment banking in the Middle East, is credited with putting together the deal that rescued Barclays by raising cash in Qatar and Abu Dhabi. He is reckoned to be Barclays' biggest earner, receiving £25 million last year.
What links the two of them is Diana Jenkins, the banker's 36-year-old wife and mother of their two children aged seven and four.
Mrs Jenkins, who came to London as a refugee from war-torn Bosnia, is said to be a brilliant networker who counts Crawford, Sir Mick Jagger and Paris Hilton among her friends.
Mr Jenkins has credited her with introducing him to Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani, Qatar's prime minister, and a major backer behind the Barclays bail-out. Since June, Hamad has put in billions and is now Barclays' biggest share holder.
Sources said Mrs Jenkins had helped organise the event, bringing together the guests for the dinner and party, which went on until 4am.
Clooney, a UN ambassador and campaigner, highlighting the horrors of the Darfur genocide, is understood to have addressed the audience on the plight of the two million people displaced in the region.
Kid Rock provided the music while television chefs Antony Worrall Thompson and Ainsley Harriott did the cooking. The chefs told photographers they were strictly assigned to kitchen duties and not invited to mingle with the A-list guests after dinner.
Security guards had to fetch extra supplies of champagne after the guests got through hundreds of bottles within two hours.
Mr Jenkins first rose to public attention when he became the highest-paid employee of a FTSE 100 company in history, taking home a reported £75million in 2005.
While other bankers will have seen their pay packets reduced in the credit crunch, Mr Jenkins is likely to have bucked the trend. His reward for putting together the Barclays rescue package is rumoured to be in the region of £30 million.
Mr Jenkins married Diana in London in 1999, having met at City University where she was one of his students.
"She is my consigliere and counsellor," Jenkins has said of his wife.
