What kind of man gets to date The Body? A £300m British banker whose ego is as big as his wallet

Elle Macpherson, veteran of bikini shots that reduce mortal women to tears, has been pictured in Ibiza.
At 48, she is still as annoyingly sun-kissed and leggy as ever, in that straw cowboy hat she must have been born wearing.
But hang on — one thing has changed this year.
Who is that rather uncomfortable-looking bald chap she is canoodling with so enthusiastically? A music mogul? A Hollywood titan? Well, no — he’s rather more controversial than that.

Not only is Roger Jenkins very rich like all Elle Macpherson's boyfriends (self-made women don't trust those without) but he also has extraordinary athletic stamina and a known taste for strong, glamorous women

The Body’s new man is one of the big beasts of the City pages, the banker who saved Barclays and is known as Roger the Dodger. Or should we say tax avoider?
Roger Jenkins, 56, said to be worth £300 million, is a Scottish-born hard-nut who was at one time the highest paid man at Barclays when he ran their legal but much-criticised tax avoidance division.
Before he left in 2009, his pay packet was big news because, on a rumoured £40 million a year, he pocketed more even than his old boss at Barclays Capital, Bob Diamond of Libor fame.
They look like an odd couple, she so girlish and frisky, he as dour as a tax return. But on closer examination, this new couple make perfect sense.
Not only is he very rich like all Elle’s boyfriends (self-made women don’t trust those without) but he also has extraordinary athletic stamina and a known taste for strong, glamorous women.  


Elle is a fitness freak, known to live off calorie-calibrated salads specially delivered to her home and to spend at least an hour every day exercising (even her trainer/nutritionist James Duigan is famous now). 
But if anything, Roger’s sporting credentials are even more impressive than those of Elle — he was an athlete who raced for Scotland at the Commonwealth Games.
Roger and Elle shared a secret break in the Bahamas together at Easter, but now they’ve gone public, frequenting Ibiza’s youthful, loud Blue Marlin beach (usually the preserve of twentysomethings and WAGS like Coleen Rooney) and having fun on superyachts.
He is said to own a marble-floored one called Utopia, which he rents out for at least £300,000 a week.
Tactfully, Elle has even been wearing Melissa Odabash swimwear, a company backed by Roger’s ex, businesswoman Diana Jenkins.

Elle is a fitness freak. She spends at least an hour every day exercising

Both have two children: Elle’s two boys by her previous financier boyfriend Arpad ‘Arki’ Busson (who, meanwhile, has just had a baby with actress Uma Thurman), and Roger’s children Innis and Eneya with Diana, who was his second wife.
Before Edinburgh-raised Jenkins made a career out of tax avoidance, he was a rugby player and amateur runner.
He was thought to be more sporty than academic at his Edinburgh Academy private school, and was the second of three sons born in 1955 to his father Arthur, who worked as an oil refinery manager, and mother Vera.
Remembered for self-discipline rather than genius, Roger read economics at Heriot-Watt University.
He ran in the Commonwealth Games for Scotland and in 1975 won a silver medal in the 400 metres at the World Student Games in Rome.
But he turned down the chance to be in the British squad for the 1976 Olympics, partly because he couldn’t be guaranteed to actually run, and partly because he knew his brother David was better than him.
David was a British record holder for the 400m and won a silver medal for relay running at the 1972 Olympics in Munich.
His career went sensationally off track when he confessed to taking performance-enhancing drugs, and in 1988 he was found guilty of smuggling steroids into the U.S. and sent to jail.
He served only ten months of a seven-year sentence and now the former cheat runs a very successful sports food and drink company in California.
While David became engulfed in scandal in the quest for a fast buck, Roger built his career at Barclays, joining as a graduate trainee, and eventually becoming one of the most inventive tax experts of his era, running The Structured Capital Markets (SCM) bit of Barclays Capital.
Unsurprisingly, the culture at this ‘tax management factory’ inside Barclays HQ in Canary Wharf was extremely macho.
One former employee said: ‘The tax avoidance was so enormous it became the engine of growth for the whole of the investment banking arm.’
Roger Jenkins was so powerful he used to call in directors of Barclays and tell them he would fire one of them if their next deal failed. Apparently it wasn’t a joke.
The place was rife with internal politics, at which Jenkins was said to excel. He worked with another Scot, former lawyer Iain Abrahams.
Team-building ‘away days’ featured the two of them playing poker, with staff divided up into ‘big boys’ and ‘babies’ tables, and Jenkins and Abrahams were said to have a couple of hundred thousand pounds to gamble between them.
‘Abes’ once pretended to put a director in a electric chair with the music playing: ‘I hate you and I hope you die.’ 

Elle has two boys by her previous financier boyfriend Arpad 'Arki' Busson, who has just had a baby with actress Uma Thurman

Still, it was all legal.
As Lib Dem peer Lord Oakeshott once said, HMRC’s attempts to detect the bank’s tax avoidance were like ‘a fat policeman chasing a speeding Ferrari’.
The other extraordinary thing to happen to Jenkins, apart from his lucrative career, was his marriage to his second wife.
The Bosnian refugee turned philanthropist and entrepreneur, who met Jenkins in a gym in London’s Barbican, has never revealed quite how she made it from Bosnia to London.
With her help, he allegedly saved Barclays from collapse by persuading the Qatari royal family to invest billions in the bank so it didn’t need a public bail-out.
Sanela Dijana Catic, who changed her name to Diana, arrived from Sarajevo speaking no English and with no money or family.
She says she worked as a cleaner, waitress and babysitter, and ‘ran a jewellery stall on the streets’ and lived off Toblerones before enrolling on a computer course.
She met Roger and married him in 1999, the same year their son, Innis, was born. Their daughter Eneya was born three years later.
Diana’s past was grim — she had been brought up on the 12th floor of a communist tower block — but it was also tragic; while she was in London her younger brother was murdered.

Roger's ex-wife Diana, arrived from Sarajevo speaking no English and with no money or family

She changed her name and reinvented herself to cope with her grief.
Somehow, when she met Roger, they both changed.
His career went into the ascendant and this woman, who had grown up watching Dynasty and made it her ‘blueprint for life’, became the celebrity networker bar none.
Her charity fundraising parties featured everyone from George Clooney to Cindy Crawford to Elton John.
But although her friendships with Qatari royals are said to have helped save Barclays from collapse, she found London snobby.
The relationship foundered.
One night she was photographed partying late into the night with footballer Rio Ferdinand, which didn’t seem ideal for a married mother of two.
When I was editor of Tatler, she told the magazine she had been treated like a mail-order bride, and moved to Malibu in a huff.
When we were publishing a feature on Mr and Mrs Jenkins, he offered to buy 30,000 copies of the magazine if I put his wife — The Governor, as he called her — on the cover; I’m not sure if he was joking or not.
The couple split in 2009.
Jenkins said that Diana, once described as a ‘one woman tsunami of adrenaline’, would receive half his money, believed to be about £150 million, because she deserved it as they had built their fortune together.
If it was her social skills that led the Qataris to invest £4 billion with Barclays during the credit crunch then he has a point.
As they split, she went to found a drinks company called Neuro (she had always wanted to be a businesswoman in her own right, rather than someone’s wife) and he left Barclays and launched Elkstone Capital in Dublin.
After that ill-timed venture, he took a position as managing partner at Brazilian bank BTG Pactual, where he made even more money from the bank’s £10 billion flotation — his share was worth £122 million.
He now spends his time between London, Sao Paulo and California — and, thanks to his ex, mixes in circles a long way from those of the Scottish runner who became a Barclays trainee.
Circles in which he met Australia’s most famous model, underwear tycoon, swimwear poster girl and all-round big person, Elle Macpherson.
Long separated from Arki, Elle had last been seen on the arm of Jeff Soffer, a property developer and hotelier (he inherited a hotel chain from his father) five years her junior who she had said she might ‘take the next step with’ before he disappeared on the arm of a young Colombian model.
Self-made Roger seems more up Elle’s street than a young heir anyway. Those in their circle believe they might be rather well-suited.
‘Both have strong egos and an absolute determination to control events and succeed.’
Certainly, you wouldn’t want to mess with the combined force of Roger the Dodger and the Body.