A trio of Black investment bankers at Barclays Plc allege the firm fostered a culture of racism at its London HQ, denying them promotion and making them the target of lazy stereotypes by colleagues.
(Bloomberg) — A trio of Black investment bankers at Barclays Plc allege the firm fostered a culture of racism at its London HQ, denying them promotion and making them the target of lazy stereotypes by colleagues.
The men, from Cameroonian backgrounds, sued Barclays over similar race discrimination allegations at a joint trial in London.
Christian Abanda Bella, who works in the lender’s analytics team, said he felt racially stereotyped as the “aggressive Black man” by colleagues when he pushed back on one team project, according to court documents.
Barclays denies all of the accusations and the bank is contesting the case, according to its lawyers. Decisions regarding promotions and or allocation of work “had nothing to do with race nor did they cause any particular disadvantage in respect of any particular racial group,” Barclays said in court documents. A spokesperson for Barclays declined to comment further.
London banks have been hit with a string of race and sex discrimination suits as employees try to hold their working cultures to account. The bankers’ cases not only cover allegations of the culture of race discrimination at Barclays but also how the claims are dealt with internally.
UK employment tribunal claims for unfair dismissal are now capped at just over £105,707 ($132,230). But damages are unlimited if discrimination is proved.
Louis Philippe Samnick, who no longer works at the bank, alleges he faced similar treatment when he spoke out at work. When he raised concerns over a specific project, his compensation was set unjustly and he wasn’t included in a promotion process, according to his witness statement. In comparison to a White colleague, he said he was set up to “fail and managed out.”
Samnick claims a boss on the traded valuation team would frequently refer to the three bankers as the “French legion,” which he said disparaged them as foreign.
“There are three others in that clique. Another commonality is French language,” the senior colleague wrote in one email to a separate colleague that was shown in court evidence.
The third person, Henry-Serge Moune Nkeng, who works in the Barclays risk team, alleges that as part of a campaign of discrimination and harassment he was forced to go to the office during a serious knee injury. “Even today, I woke up in the morning and wonder what I did to deserve such cruel treatment,” he said in a witness statement.
A lawyer for Barclays said at the hearing on Thursday that Moune Nkeng had exaggerated his case to make the situation look worse than the reality.
Moune Nkeng, argued that an internal report called Race at Work, published by Barclays in April 2019, “supported the fact that racial discrimination is part of Barclays’s culture.”
He said it highlighted the lack of career progression available to Black and other minority colleagues within the bank.
An earlier court judgment struck out a bid by the bankers to target some colleagues individually in the suit.
Abanda Bella, Samnick and Moune Nkeng, who are representing themselves in court, didn’t immediately respond to requests for a comment via Linkedin.
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