(Newser)
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Barclays CEO Bob Diamond has bowed to pressure and followed bank chairman Marcus Agius out the door in the wake of the Libor rate-rigging scandal. Agius claimed "the buck stops" with him when he quit yesterday, and Diamond initially resisted calls to resign. He admitted that some of the rate-fixing happened on his watch but insisted that he would still be the best person to change the culture of Britain's second-biggest bank, the Telegraph reports. The bank was fined $453 million last week for trying to fix the lending rate.
"I am deeply disappointed that the impression created by the events announced last week about what Barclays and its people stand for could not be further from the truth," said Diamond, who will still have to testify before Parliament today about his bank's role in the scandal. Ironically, Agius, despite his resignation as chairman, will now replace Diamond while the bank searches for a replacement, the BBC reports. Diamond's shouldn't be the last head to roll, says a Bloomberg editorial, which calls for jail terms for "those who knowingly manipulated the market," and notes that at least a dozen other firms are being probed in the scandal.
