A trader with reason to be very angry left Barclays in New York

Remember David Fotheringhame? He's the former head of electronic fixed income currencies and commodities (FICC) trading at Barclays who was - wrongfully it turned out - let go by the bank in 2016 after the New York Department of Financial Services incorrectly claimed he'd been a key player in a 'Last Look' trading system that rejected unprofitable orders for the bank. If you remember Fotheringhame, you'll also remember that he exonerated himself (and created a website on his case), and then demanded a job back at Barclays. Barclays declined to oblige and in February this year Fotheringham extracted £948k ($1.2m) from Barclays to compensate for his pains. 

Now a trader who was arguably even more wronged than Fotheringham and was even more senior has left Barclays (seemingly voluntarily). It's not clear what he plans to do next, but Barclays may want to set some money aside in case he decides to go full Fotheringhame in future.

Rob Bogucki spent nearly 11 years at Barclays before leaving in April 2019. He joined the bank from Lehman in 2008 and previously worked for Merrill, Morgan Stanley and Goldman. Bogucki has pedigree. At Barclays he was co-head of the global macro division, managing 700 people. - Until he was accused by the U.S. Department of Justice of misleading Hewlett-Packard on a £6bn ($7.7bn) currency deal and charged with attempted fraud in January 2018.

Like Fotheringhame, Bogucki was fully acquitted of any wrongdoing. In March this year, a judge in California threw his case out of court, noting that Bogucki's aggressive trading (against $11bn in options HP accumulated to buy Autonomy Corp) was totally in line with market norms. - But this was only after Bogucki had sat out of the market for over a year and been widely disparaged in the press.

Neither Barclays nor Bogucki responded to a request to comment on his exit. Bogucki, however, is clearly miffed. In a post on LinkedIn, he refers to his "horrible experience." It probably doesn't help that Barclays' internal and external counsels helped assemble the spurious case against him. - Nor did it go unnoticed that shortly after Bogucki was indicted by the DOJ, the bank itself avoided charges by paying a $12.8m fine...

Bogucki's next move is unknown. But we may not have heard the end of this yet.

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