Simon Morris has been appointed to head up the new Barclays Wealth Advisory office, having been with this side of the business for seven years. He first joined Barclays in Geneva in 2005 and has been based in Jersey since 2009. In his former career he worked for Close Brothers, SG Hambros and Royal Bank of Canada.

Monaco is an important location for the wealth advisory business, Barclays Wealth said in a statement, and its staff in the principality will be liaising with the firm’s private bankers, as well as clients’ own legal and tax advisors on such matters as estate planning and asset protection.

The prospect of buying property in Monaco was recently given extra allure by a new French law which cut to 4.5 per cent the registration tax on Monegasque property sales, adding to the benefit of how investors can rent out property in the principality without having to pay tax on rental income. Another benefit is the possibility of an owner of a property in Monaco being able to transfer to a spouse or children without having to pay inheritance tax.

In other recent news about Barclays Wealth, earlier this week the firm appointed former UBS senior manager Julian Wantling as head of global foreign exchange. At UBS, where Wantling had a 25-year career, he worked primarily in FX distribution for both the investment bank and the wealth management divisions. Since November 2010, he had also been global head of precious metals distribution. 

Wantling joins at the end of February and will report to Thomas Fekete, head of investment products for the UK and EMEA.