For those of you who were dozing on the beach this summer, with your smart-phones switched off, a leading Portuguese bank was restructured in August and no one, least of all the regulators, seems to have forewarned us of this impending disaster.

The partial withdrawal by Barclays from investment banking is starting to look disorderly – more retreat from Moscow than Dunkirk-style retrenchment.

Barclays cuts its investment bank in half; Deutsche raises equity to protect market share.

The Bahrain award is one of the easier ones in the region to decide upon; Ahli United is the leader on almost any metric. Its $579.4 million net profit for the 2013 financial year ($366.5 million after allowing for a one-off exceptional gain) was a record and a 25.7% improvement on the previous year, as well as being the biggest profit in the country’s banking industry. Total assets grew 9.3% to $32.65 billion; loans, 8.3%; customer deposits, 17.4%. NPLs are a healthy 2.4% and total provisions for those NPLs 149.4%, while the bank’s capital adequacy ratio now stands at 16.2%. Most of these metrics lead the industry.

Jenkins is at a dead-end. This is what happens when you have no strategy and just muddle through instead of taking the necessary and painful decisions.

A chronology of the controversial Barclays-Qatar courtship amid a UK investigation into the capital raising.