Barclays recoups £300m in bonuses Barclays has recouped about £300m in promised bonuses from its bankers in the biggest ever effort by a global bank to strip staff of previous years" awards. The move by the UK lender underlines how banks are enforcing clawback provisions on a much broader scale than in the past as they seek to show regulators and investors they are taking tough action to deal with past failures. "This demonstrates that banks are more prepared to use clawbacks and you will see other banks that have been caught up in Libor doing something similar," said Jon Gilligan, partner at law firm GQ Employment Law. Barclays is expected to reveal the clawbacks in its 2012 annual report in the next two weeks but it will not disclose the number of bankers hit by withdrawals, people close to the situation said. The move comes after Barclays was rocked by a series of scandals that included manipulation of Libor and mis-selling of various financial products. The bank has reduced last year's group-wide bonus pool by 14 per cent to £1.85bn as its new management seeks to restore Barclays" image and redistribute some of the spoils from employees to shareholders. Antony Jenkins, who replaced Bob Diamond as chief executive amid the Libor scandal, has promised to turn Barclays into a bank that is "doing well financially and behaving well." About half of the clawbacks will be enforced in relation with the manipulation of the Libor benchmark interest rate, which prompted the bank to pay a £290m fine to regulators in the UK and US last summer. The other half will be clawed back because of the bank's involvement in the mis-selling of payment protection insurance and other misconduct. Barclays had more than £2.9bn in outstanding deferred bonus payments at the end of last year, giving Mr Jenkins leeway to claw back a sizeable amount without risking a series of staff defections. Banks globally from HSBC and Royal Bank of Scotland in the UK to JPMorgan in the US have started to claw back bonuses from a limited number of staff in recent years after rules to hold employees financially accountable for illicit or loss-making behaviour came into fore in 2009. Swiss bank UBS, which became the first global bank to introduce clawbacks five years ago, in 2011 withheld SFr204m of deferred awards in the wake of an unauthorised trading loss. The bank is making its staff pay for a sizeable part of its $1.5bn Libor fine through a combination of clawbacks and by reducing last year's bonus pool in the investment bank by a third. RBS is expected to claw back at least £60m in deferred bonuses from up to 1,000 investment bankers as it seeks to partly recoup a £390m fine paid for the manipulation of Libor. It is also set to shave as much as £140m from last year's bonus pool to leave an amount of about £250m. Clawback rules allow banks to reduce or eliminate the deferred parts of bonuses that have not yet paid out. They can do so if the profits generated by an individual or division fail to measure up to expectations held when the award was made.