After Barclays, a Former Chief Strives to Revive His Reputation in Africa

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Robert Diamond in London in 2012. He has worked for Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse First Boston and Barclays.Credit Lefteris Pitarakis/Associated Press

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When Barclays announced on Thursday that it planned to slash the size and scope of its investment bank, the British effectively halted a long campaign to become a true Wall Street powerhouse, one to rival Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase.

But the architect of that push, Robert E. Diamond Jr., isn’t around to see his long-held dream unwound.

Instead, the former Barclays chief executive is busy with his new venture, an investment firm specializing in African lenders. It is a more modest project, one that has kept the American-born banker busy since being pushed out of his former firm nearly two years ago.

When once he spearheaded huge acquisitions to make the investment bank of Barclays much bigger — including buying the American capital markets unit of the bankrupt Lehman Brothers in September 2008 — Mr. Diamond now shuttles between his Midtown Manhattan offices and Africa, in search of potential investment opportunities in the continent.

“It seems so clear to me that private sector growth is the single most important thing today that can help Africa continue to develop economically, create jobs and create economic growth,” Mr. Diamond told reporters at a conference in Lagos, Nigeria, earlier this year.

It is yet another restart for the 62-year-old Massachusetts native, who climbed the ranks of Barclays by pushing the British firm to become more aggressive, and perhaps a bit more American.

Though he had not intended on becoming a banker — he once thought he would become a teacher, like his parents — Mr. Diamond entered Wall Street in 1979 as a bond trader at Morgan Stanley. He then went to Credit Suisse First Boston in 1992, and in 1996 joined Barclays’ investment division.

It was there that Mr. Diamond worked to create a new British colossus. He built a giant money manager, Barclays Global Investors, and then sold it to BlackRock for $13.5 billion in 2009. But his legacy was Barclays’ investment bank, which when combined with the Lehman operations became a force in mergers advice and the trading of stocks and debt.

And Mr. Diamond benefited as well, taking home more than $30 million from 2007 to 2012 and enduring puns from the British press over his name.

But Barclays — once admired for being one of the few major British lenders to avoid needing a government bailout — was laid low by scandal, notably its participation in a wide-ranging scheme to manipulate global interest rate benchmarks. Mr. Diamond was forced out as chief executive under pressure from British regulators.

He has since returned to the world of finance in the form of Atlas Mara, where he has teamed up with Ashish J. Thakkar, an African entrepreneur who fled Rwanda during that country’s genocide 20 years ago. They are building what they hope will become one of the continent’s top financial services groups. (Mr. Thakkar is the force behind Mara Group, which has technology, manufacturing and real estate interests in 19 African countries.)

Though Mr. Diamond was not a speaker on any panels during this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the banker was widely noticed as he zipped from meeting to meeting in the snowy Alpine town in January.

For Mr. Diamond, Africa represents a chance to revive his reputation in a region that has typically been neglected by Western bankers. Last year, Atlas Mara Co-Nvest, Mr. Diamond’s new venture, raised $325 million to fund potential acquisitions.

Since the end of March, Atlas Mara has signed a memorandum of understanding to potentially privatize the commercial arm of the state-owned Development Bank of Rwanda and to take a majority stake in ABC Holdings, which runs the African bank BancABC.

The two deals will give Atlas Mara exposure to growing financial markets — as well as an expanding middle class — in Botswana, Mozambique, Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Rwanda, as well as South Africa.

Yet Mr. Diamond’s old employer may soon emerge as a rival. As part of its retrenchment, Barclays said on Thursday that it planned to make banking in Africa one of its four core businesses. The British lender is looking to potentially sell or wind down the bulk of its other retail banking operations in Europe outside of Britain.

“This is an exciting, growing part of the world where we are very well positioned,” Antony P. Jenkins, the chief executive of Barclays and Mr. Diamond’s successor, said on Thursday.

But the American banker has looked to his old stamping grounds to poach talent as well. Last month, Atlas Mara tapped John Vitalo, the Barclays chief executive for the Middle East and North Africa and a former colleague of Mr. Diamond’s, as its group chief executive.