Roger and Diana Jenkins separate

£75m-a-year banker and his party-loving wife split leaving 'the man who saved Barclays' open to claim on half his fortune

By Ben Todd

Last updated at 2:13 AM on 29th January 2011

One of Britain’s richest bankers has separated from his glamorous wife, a former Bosnian refugee renowned for her love of celebrity company.

Roger Jenkins, 53, earned £75million from Barclays in 2005 alone and was the highest-paid employee of a FTSE 100 company.

He and wife Diana, 37, broke up after moving to California, where they have a £15million clifftop home overlooking Malibu beach.

Sources say they still share the house for the sake of their two children and have ‘no plans’ to divorce.

However Mrs Jenkins, who has been linked over the years with footballer Rio Ferdinand, singer Justin Timberlake and Madonna’s ex-husband Guy Ritchie, has acquired a separate home in Beverly Hills.

Although there is no suggestion that anyone else was involved in the break-up, sources say that in recent months she has become close to a younger male companion in Los Angeles.

Should she decide to seek a divorce in California, she could win up to half the couple’s fortune, conservatively estimated at £150million.

Mr Jenkins is regarded as the man who saved Barclays at the height of the credit crunch. He once said of his wife: ‘I wouldn’t be where I am today without her. I can do anything now. I surrender to her better judgment on people and business.’

Last night, the couple released a statement to the Daily Mail confirming the break-up. It read: ‘Diana and Roger separated at the end of 2009 after a decade of marriage which came to a natural end.

‘They parted as friends and continue to be supportive of each other and committed to their children, who they are raising together in Los Angeles.’

Bizarrely, the statement continued: ‘As well as her children, Diana’s focus is her rapidly expanding drinks business Neuro, which was named the Best Functional Beverage in the USA for 2010.’

Roger Jenkins is a former sprinter whose brother David won an Olympic 400 metres silver medal for Britain in 1972 but was later jailed in a drug-trafficking scandal.

When he met Sanela Dijana Catic, Mr Jenkins was an ambitious but little-known executive at Barclays. Describing herself as a ‘Bosnian Communist Muslim’, she had grown up in Sarajevo when the Balkan wars were at their height.

She came to Britain in 1993 with no money and almost no English and lived initially in Brixton, south London. She took menial work to finance a night-school course in English, then ran a market stall selling jewellery. She eventually saved enough to enrol at City of London University.

While there she launched an investment fund, through which she met Mr Jenkins. They married in 1999.

Although her husband had little interest in socialising, she became friendly with celebrities including Sir Mick Jagger, Sir Elton John, George Clooney, Brad Pitt and Guy Ritchie. She organised charity events to raise money for Darfur and Haiti.
However, according to Mrs Jenkins, in the eyes of London’s rich wives she was viewed as nothing more than an ‘Eastern European mail-order bride’.

She recalled how one day, at a charity gala, ‘I looked around the room and thought, “What am I doing here with these people? I would rather be at home eating pizza in my pyjamas.” I felt really unfulfilled, empty, almost dirty.’

In 2003, a newspaper reported that Mrs Jenkins had enjoyed an intimate evening with Manchester United and England star Rio Ferdinand after meeting him at a London nightclub.

A witness recalled: ‘Rio couldn’t keep his hands off her. She was wearing a tiny black dress that barely covered her bottom. He loved it. Everyone was giving her the eye, but she was only interested in Rio. He kissed and caressed her all night.’

In June 2009, Mrs Jenkins left a private party at the Punchbowl, the Mayfair pub owned by Guy Ritchie, with Justin Timberlake. Her solicitors angrily denied suggestions of anything untoward, saying she was most definitely ‘not having a relationship with Mr Timberlake’ and ‘returned home to her husband’ after the party.

Similar denials ensued in October 2009 following another party at the same venue. This time, Mrs Jenkins was seen leaving with Ritchie himself.

Although she and her husband were growing apart, she continued to play an important role in his business life.

It was, apparently, she who charmed the Qatari royal family into parting with billions to take a stake in Barclays at a crucial moment during the global banking crisis.

Since then, she has launched a number of businesses, including a swimwear company, Avalon Fashions and the Neuro energy drinks.

After leaving Barclays, Mr Jenkins set up a business advising sovereign wealth funds and other institutions on corporate deals. It has offices in London, Los Angeles and the Middle East. He still retains a Mayfair mansion worth upwards of £16million.

In a gushing interview in Tatler magazine in 2009, Mr Jenkins said: ‘I think – I hope – I am with Diana for a very long time.’

His wife was less effusive, saying: ‘I might be with him, or I might not be with him. Who knows what tomorrow brings?’

melbert wrote:I HOPE he doesn't go there!

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5th December 2008

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George Clooney raised an astonishing £10million for the victims of Darfur hosting a fund-raising party at the Mayfair home of one of the City’s highest earners.
The Hollywood actor joined forces with Roger Jenkins, a senior executive at Barclays, for an event at which the 100 guests were charged as much as £10,000 a ticket.

Guests included Clooney’s best buddy Matt Damon as well as Scarlett Johansson, Cindy Crawford, Sarah Ferguson, Bono and Guy Ritchie.

Clooney and Jenkins may seem at first glance an odd couple. The American is one of Hollywood’s biggest stars with a penchant for liberal good causes and a playboy image.

Jenkins, 52, chairman of Barclays investment banking in the Middle East, is credited with putting together the deal that rescued Barclays by raising cash in Qatar and Abu Dhabi.

He is reckoned to be Barclays’ biggest earner, receiving £25 million last year.
What links the two of them is Diana Jenkins, the banker’s 36-year-old wife and mother of their two children aged seven and four.

Mrs Jenkins, who came to London as a refugee from war-torn Bosnia, is said to be a brilliant networker who counts Crawford, Sir Mick Jagger and Paris Hilton among her friends.

She even served as bridesmaid at Pamela Anderson's ill-fated marriage to Kid Rock on board a yacht in St Tropez two years ago.

Last year, she joined forces with Sir Elton John to host a star-studded karaoke party at Ronnie Scott's Jazz Club in Soho.

Sources said Mrs Jenkins had helped organise the event, bringing together the guests for the dinner and party, which went on until 4am.

Clooney, a UN ambassador and campaigner, highlighting the horrors of the Darfur genocide, is understood to have addressed the audience on the plight of the two million people displaced in the region.

Money from the night went towards his Not On Our Watch charity, which he set up with his Ocean's trilogy co-stars Don Cheadle, Brad Pitt and Matt Damon.
Kid Rock provided the music while television chefs Antony Worrall Thompson and Ainsley Harriott did the cooking.

Security guards had to fetch extra supplies of champagne after the guests got through hundreds of bottles within two hours.

Mr Jenkins first rose to public attention when he became the highest-paid employee of a FTSE 100 company in history, taking home a reported £75million in 2005.

While other bankers will have seen their pay packets reduced in the credit crunch, Mr Jenkins is likely to have bucked the trend.

Mr Jenkins married Diana in London in 1999, having met at City University where she was one of his students.

'She is my consigliere and counsellor,' Jenkins has said of his wife.

Last month, Diana moved into the film business after launching a distribution company with Will Smith.

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Stars underdressed for a good purpose

George Clooney et al. appear in Diana Jenkins' "Room 23," featuring photographs by Deborah Anderson.

By TINA DAUNT

February 17, 2009

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If Anaïs Nin had a Nikon D3 and every celebrity in town on her BlackBerry, her photos would probably look a lot like those Deborah Anderson shot for the book, "Room 23."

Anderson, a photographer whose distinctive sensuality is located somewhere between classic French erotica and Helmut Newton -- is releasing a hefty coffee-table volume today filled with an impressive list of stars: George Clooney, Lindsay Lohan, Kid Rock, Sharon Stone, James Blunt, Cindy Crawford, Elton John.

But beware: This book probably shouldn't be left on the table with pubescent teens or lonely spouses in the house. Most of the men are in tuxedos and suits (except the ones who are partially undressed). And the women are in lingerie and slinky evening gowns.

It's a tradition of portraiture that dates to Max Beckmann, the German Expressionist. It's one in which the sensual charge comes from the juxtaposition of social formality and the erotic impulse.

There's a photo of Lohan standing on a bed with men at her feet. Another picture features Stone lounging in bed à deux with model Cheryl Tiegs. (Lots of Champagne and red grapes consumed at that shoot.)

Anderson, the daughter of Yes lead singer Jon Anderson, worked to bring together this collision of high-wattage stardom and piquant sexuality as a fundraising effort for Malibu entrepreneur and activist Diana Jenkins. Jenkins, who was born in Bosnia and lost a brother in the genocide there, has made a cause of helping to create an international legal framework that can bring war criminals of all stripes to justice.

A friend gave Jenkins a photo shoot with Anderson, who is well known in town for her erotic photography and whose work had given her an international reputation for classy sensuality. The two hit it off and decided that they had to do a project to benefit a cause that, as it turned out, they both had deep feelings about.

"Room 23" was the result. Anderson's concept was as simple, elegant and sexy as a good black dress -- a year in the life of an upscale hotel room.

Jenkins went to work providing the celebrities' contacts, and over the course of months Anderson worked out of a single suite at the Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills with a skeleton crew of assistants. It made for an intimate and unique perspective on these well-known personalities.

"There was a lot of personal interaction behind the lens," said Anderson, whose earlier work includes a book called "Paperthin," a contemporary take on 1930s-style Parisian erotica. " 'Room 23' allowed me the freedom to tell a story in vignettes."

The book will be unveiled tonight at an exclusive celebrity fundraiser at the very same Peninsula Hotel where the photos were taken.

Meanwhile in May, Anderson -- a singer as well as a photographer -- will release an electronic pop album called "Silence." The disc will feature images Anderson took of nude and semi-clothed subjects, including Tilda Swinton, Minnie Driver, Natasha Henstridge, Fergie and Pink. (Anderson also shot Pink's album cover for "Funhouse." And she recently completed a photo shoot of actress Lisa Rinna for Playboy.)

"My parents were always clear that we should pursue the highest form of creativity," Anderson said. "It's how we lived our lives. I was never told, 'No, you can't.' "

"No" wasn't a word that appeared frequently in Nin's vocabulary either.

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Diana Jenkins: Refugee fashions success out of war-torn past

Diana Jenkins has come a long way since she left war-torn Bosnia and her business interests are growing with the launch of a new drinks brand.

By Jonathan Sibun 9:30PM BST 27 Jun 2009

Diana Jenkins passes over a book of photos of her friends. Adorning the cover is a picture of a beautiful brunette clad in nothing more than a sheet. The inside pages continue the theme. Stunning men and women and pages and pages of flesh.

These, Diana explains, are her friends. But these aren't any old friends. When she points out George, that's George Clooney to you and me. And then there's Cindy and Sharon - for which read Crawford and Stone - and Elton and husband David, Christian Slater, James Blunt and Jenkins herself. The list goes on and the photos in Room 23, a coffee-table book Jenkins put together to raise money for charity, range from the witty to the downright sexy and everywhere in between.

There aren't too many people who could assemble such a rank of the rich and famous, let alone persuade them to strip down to their bare essentials, but Jenkins appears to have found it all rather easy. Or as Cindy Crawford puts it in the foreword: "Only Diana could pull this off. For D, these things just have a way of coming together, darling."

A businesswoman and philanthropist, Jenkins is the woman with the black book to die for. Combining striking looks with a canny mind, her business interests include a fashion house, drinks brand and a film distribution company.

Jenkins takes her name from her husband, Roger Jenkins, the Barclays executive who masterminded last year's investment in the bank by the Qatari and Abu Dhabi royal families.

The two make a formidable team, both personally and professionally.

Last week Diana was a guest of Elton John's at the annual celebrity bash for his Aids charity at the musician's home in Windsor. Jenkins was acting as a sponsor for the party, using it to launch her new drinks brand, Neuro.

The brand's claim is to help drinkers' performance. Neurosporti is for the athletic, Neurotrim for the unathletic, Neurosleep for the insomniacs, and Neurogasm for the would-be lotharios.

The brand is marketing savvy and cheeky, while celebrity support should be easy to come by if Jenkins' track record is anything to go by. The decision to launch it in the heart of a recession looks optimistic but Jenkins is definitely a glass half-full kind of person.

"I'm optimistic. I'm always optimistic," the 36-year old says, before launching into a life story that suggests she has every right to be.

Born in Sarajevo, Bosnia, Jenkins grew up as the Yugoslav civil war raged, a conflict that left her brother and many close friends dead and her living in a refugee camp.

"I was living off charity and had nothing and thought I would rather be dead than live like that. I came to the UK as a refugee in 1993 and ended up in Brixton," she says, in near perfect, though accented, English. "I couldn't speak English, I didn't have any money and I didn't know anybody. It was literally about survival."

A graduate of the University of Sarajevo, Jenkins went looking for a job in London's Covent Garden and persuaded a store to take her on, initially paying £2 an hour. Putting herself through night-school to learn English while working in the store and as a cleaner, she saved enough money to open her own jewellery stall. The business was successful and she opened further stalls, eventually saving herself enough to enrol at City University. While there she launched her own investment fund and met her future husband. The two were married 10 years ago and have two young children.

The story is almost too good to be true and Jenkins admits it is extreme: "Roger did marry a Bosnian communist Muslim. He put a lot of trust in a girl who could have been a total nutcase". But she claims her success is simply a product of her past.

"When you grow up in the UK there is a strategic way of doing things and you map out where you want to go with your career," she says. "But when you're just surviving, like I was, you're always looking and pushing doors."

While Roger, 53, is thought to earn about £40m a year, Diana has opened her own doors. And most of her husband's as well.

Jenkins claims her majority stake in Melissa Odabesh, the small fashion house, was a product of the refugee's mentality. "I wanted to buy a bikini, met Melissa and I liked her. I said to her, I can help you. We ended up opening a store in Malibu."

It was that approach that helped Barclays seal its Middle East investment last year. While Diana is reluctant to take any credit, insisting that her husband masterminded the deal, she was instrumental in bringing the two sides together after forming a close relationship with the wife of Sheikh Hamad Al-Thani, the Prime Minister of Qatar.

It was Malcolm Gladwell, the US author, who came up with the notion of connectors, people whose social skills allow them to bring different people together, and Jenkins is the perfect example.

"It's just what I do, it's what I enjoy. Because I am really casual, people feel comfortable around me and I can read people very well," she says. "Roger and I couldn't be any more different but we make a good team. He's very stable, focused and calm. I sometimes have to force him to open the door to new opportunities. He's not about instinct, whereas I do my things almost in a cowboy, wild way."

As she points out, her love for life - which has seen her become a paparazzi favourite following trips to some of London's most fashionable late-night haunts - should not come as a big surprise.

"I grew up in Bosnia and for 20 years I was locked up at 7pm with no TV or computer," she says. "So when you come into the world, you want to see it. The first time I saw Will Smith's video 'Welcome to Miami', I thought I have to go there. Then you see it's not like you imagined, but you've got to discover that yourself."

With the drinks business up and running, Jenkins says she needs to focus on her film distribution joint-venture with Will Smith, the US actor. The two are looking for a chief executive to head the company which will distribute films in the Middle East.

But it will not be long before Jenkins has another project up and running.

"Part of my success is that when I do one thing, I live it and I breathe it. Then when it's there, I move on," she says. "Roger always laughs at me because the moment I get there, then I'm done. I like the journey."

That journey has also involved charitable works. Jenkins set up a charity for Bosnian orphans in memory of her late brother and a human rights organisation under her full name, Sanela Diana Jenkins. Meanwhile, an event co-hosted with George Clooney in December helped raise £10m for refugees from Darfur.

That is unlikely to be enough to make Jenkins sit still. She is already making plans for what's next. She has a "movie in the pipeline, which I can't talk about", is considering a follow up book and will be busy promoting Bosnia, where she is an honorary adviser to the President.

"I really want to help the economy. I want to see if I can use any of my personal contacts to bring business to Bosnia," she says.

The process might be a long one. The country remains consumed by hurt and anger from the civil war, though Jenkins is spreading the message that people need to move on. "Nobody cares when you're complaining, so get on your feet and stop wasting your life," she says. "Some people don't want to take a chance. Others want the world."

There is little doubt in which camp Jenkins sits.

playfuldeb wrote: Sounds like her husband was there as well

playfuldeb wrote:If George wanted to date her, he could have done it then, when those photos were taken, but he didnt, he moved from SL to EC.

Lighterside wrote:And we have to also take into account that George is capable of seeing more than one woman at a time. I think he's got them stashed all over the world here and there...you know for those booty calls while he's away on location. I doubt that the man is ever alone unless he wants to be.

Vi wrote:

Lighterside wrote:And we have to also take into account that George is capable of seeing more than one woman at a time. I think he's got them stashed all over the world here and there...you know for those booty calls while he's away on location. I doubt that the man is ever alone unless he wants to be.

it's good to know - especially for EC - that he's ......... all over the world the same time he has an 'official' girlfriend