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What a dog's breakfast Barclays has served up. If you're a royal investor from Abu Dhabi or Qatar, you get full access to the capital-raising, including the 14% instruments with tasty warrants attached, and you'll be paid up-front fees, sweeteners that add up to a cool £250m. If you're an investing institution, you can have a slice of the 14% stuff but you won't get the warrants and you can forget about fees. If you're a private investor, you're out in the cold.
As a way to trample on shareholders' rights, this takes some beating. Barclays' concessions yesterday - no executive bonuses this year (a pledge that should have been made on day one) and all directors being put up for re-election next April - are welcome. But they don't change the basic fact that it would have been much cheaper to have accepted the softer terms from the government in October.
Barclays' view is that, as an international bank, it wanted to avoid taking capital from a government with purely domestic interests. It's an argument, but it surely doesn't justify committing such crimes against shareholder value, in the phrase of one City analyst. Yesterday's morsel thrown to the protesting institutions is an improvement but the crime still stands.
For all that, shareholders should hold their noses next week and vote in favour of the proposals. Why? Only because the soft terms from the government are no longer on offer. If the fundraising were voted down, Barclays would have to go cap in hand to the Treasury and accept even harsher terms than it secured on its knees in the Middle East.
How about voting against the re-election of a few directors, particularly the non-executives? That is more tempting. The board, especially chairman Marcus Agius and senior non-executives such as Sir Nigel Rudd and Sir Richard Broadbent, is on probation. Nobody seems to have anticipated the fury that the proposals would provoke. New faces, and new thinking, would be no bad thing.
Stelios's Easy rider
EasyJet's underlying profits were down by only a third - not bad for a budget airline in stormy weather. Bookings for the winter are up - that's impressive. So surely Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou will stop moaning. Hold on, what's this? He's refusing to approve the accounts. What horrors has he discovered?
Very few, actually. Accountants may get excited about whether easyJet, after the acquisition of GB Airways, should be treated as a "single cash-generating unit", but few investors care either way. Should GB Airways' landing slots at Gatwick be treated as an intangible asset worth £72m? OK, easyJet's existing slots are given zero value in the books, but the inconsistency is hardly dangerous as long as it is in the open.
So what's Sir Stelios's game? We must assume he is showing off his muscles now he has control of his sister's shares. His aim is to bully the board into a more prudent policy on expansion and to extract a promise that dividends will be paid in 2011.
The posturing certainly frightened other investors - the shares fell 9%. But it is hard to see what the board should be doing differently. Yes, it can be fairly accused of ordering too many planes at the wrong time in the economic cycle, but it does have some wriggle room to delay delivery. It also has to consider the long-term opportunity of exploiting the woes of Alitalia and other debt-laden flag carriers. Assessing the balance on a quarterly basis seems a reasonable way to proceed. As for 2011's dividend, the winter of 2010 is the time to ponder.
It is hard to escape the thought that Sir Stelios, for all his fine words at the time he bowed out, is struggling to accept the fact that he and his siblings own only 38% of the company. That is not control. If he wants control, he should bid - if he can.
Knight knight
Theirs was an entertaining cameo, but Sir Peter Burt and Sir George Mathewson must now bow out. Their hopes of keeping HBOS independent were surely dashed by yesterday's Treasury announcement that banks that want to renegotiate their bail-outs must accept poorer terms. The killer line was the one about taking today's current price as the basis for subscription by taxpayers. In HBOS's case, the dilution for shareholders would be twice as severe.
Is this fair? Well, it is certainly right to insist that a bank should have a "sustainable business model and delivery plan". The knights failed on that score. They said only that they wanted to install themselves as the bosses. That's not a plan, it's a job application.
nils.pratley@guardian.co.uk
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