Leila Jenkins

Career

Jenkins is an economics graduate of Boston College (1977), and has an MPA from the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard (1999). She worked for the New England Merchants National Bank and the First National Bank of Boston as an international economist, and in the early 1980s she was an officer of the Credit Division of the Chemical Bank. From 1982 she was a vice president of Shields Associates, a New York investment counseling firm that she founded with four other investment professionals. She was also head of Emerging Markets Investment Management at the Bankers Trust Company and an Adjunct Professor at the Graduate School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University. She was a member of the Government Relations Committee of the Securities Industry Association. In September 1991 she founded Whitehorne & Co., a brokerage firm with ten employees that traded until 2002, and in February 1995 she founded Locke Capital Management as a wealth management firm with offices in Palm Beach and Newport.

Investigations

Jenkins and Locke Capital Management, Inc. were charged by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on March 9, 2009, with inventing a billion-dollar client, supposedly a Swiss bank, and repeatedly lying about its existence. From 2000, she claimed in marketing materials and regulatory filings to have assets worth $1.2 billion via this client, when she had no clients between 2003 and 2006, and no more than $165 million in assets. She used this claim to attract clients from 2006, including two banks that invested in a hedge fund in 2007. In 2010, Jenkins was ordered to pay $1.9 million "money earned through deceit" and $5.7 million in civil penalties in connection with activities of her investment firm, Locke Capital Management Inc. Jenkins is also accused of trying to get a second passport under the name Leila C. Sinclair using a phony Social Security number and birth certificate, months after the SEC launched its probe in New York City on November 17 She already had a passport in the name of Leila Jenkins.

Personal life

Jenkins is originally from Washington D.C., and grew up in Darien, Connecticut. Her father was president of Information Research International, a market consultancy company in Darien. Jenkins married Edward Judson Waite III in 1983 and they divorced. In November 2004, she married Malcolm Sinclair, 20th Earl of Caithness at Rosslyn Chapel after meeting him at Ascot 15 months earlier; he filed for divorce a year later. Jenkins has been an international sailing judge.