Zero Hedge shone a spotlight on the mysterious, and "without any permanent employees" company known as The London Gold Market Fixing Limited which for 117 years has served as the corporate face of the London bankers who "fix" the price of gold twice daily.

Since then, more than one of the LinkedIn pages we profiled of the bankers among the 5 gold fixing banks has quietly been taken down. However, the biggest surprise took place moments ago when none other than the head of spot gold trading at Barclays, Marc Booker, did what so many heads of spot FX trading in the past few months have done over fears of being caught in the ongoing manipulation probe: he exited stage left from Barclays HQ at One Chruchill Place.

As Reuters further reports, Marc Booker's exit leaves Martyn Whitehead, Barclays' global head of metals and mining sales, as the bank's only representative listed with the London Gold Market Fixing company. Barclays is one of the four banks that contributes to the twice-a-day price setting process for the globally recognised benchmark.