Just one in five existing Barclays shareholders backed a £4.5bn fundraising exercise by the bank that has left around 40% of its shares in foreign hands.

Just one in five existing Barclays shareholders backed a £4.5bn fundraising exercise by the bank that has left around 40% of its shares in foreign hands.

The Gulf state of Qatar is now its largest investor after shareholders signed up to buy just 267 million new shares after the Barclays share price dropped below the offer price of 282p in the days before the deadline.

The remaining 1.14 billion shares will be taken by the previously announced "anchor" investors - rather than being sold on the open market.

Although Barclays shares opened down some 3.6%, many investors netted an immediate paper profit by the end of the day after the stock soared on the back of positive news from American bank Citigroup to close up 10.2% yesterday.

Following the cash call, the state-run Qatar Investment Authority owns about 6% of Barclays, while a fund representing Qatar's prime minister has just under 2%.

Japanese bank Sumitomo Mitsui has also become an investor, while Singapore's state investment company Temasek and the state-run China Development Bank have increased holdings they bought when Barclays made an unsuccessful attempt to take over Dutch bank ABN Amro last year.

"I'm pleased to welcome new shareholders to our register as a result of our capital raising," said Barclays chief executive John Varley.

Investors remained sanguine about the process.

One fund manager told The Herald: "It doesn't matter what the take-up was because it was fully underwritten. That is all that matters from (Barclays') point of view."

He added that Barclays had the advantage of announcing its rights issue after Royal Bank of Scotland, HBOS and Bradford & Bingley revealed they were seeking more cash and would learn from the other banks' experiences.

In this case, allowing existing investors to participate under a process known as "clawback" and combining with a placing at 296p a share with Sumitomo Mitsui, enabled Barclays to get its fundraising away quickly.

It announced its plans on June 25 and the new shares will start trading on July 22. In contrast, HBOS, which has opted for a rights issue, announced its intentions at the end of April and its new shares are due to start trading on July 21.

Barclays shareholders were offered shares at 282p each, a 9.3% discount to the prevailing price at the time. They will already be sitting on a paper profit after they closed at 320.25p, a 29.75p gain on the day. "It was a very well structured and intelligent way of raising capital, it avoided the pitfalls that have been associated with rights issues," said Mamoun Tazi, analyst at MF Global.

"Barclays gave the opportunity to existing shareholders and filled the void with new investors."

Qatari investors will own just over 8% of Barclays, based on each anchor investor getting 81% of their allocation.

China Development Bank has kept its Barclays stake at around 3%. Temasek will own 2.5% to 3%, and Sumitomo Mitsui will own about 2%.

Overseas investors will now control 40% of Barclays' shares, up from about a third before the cash call. In contrast to their often criticised position of shorting banking stocks, namely betting that they will fall, several hedge funds also backed Barclays' fundraising, including GLG Partners (which is shorting Bradford & Bingley), Och-Ziff, Lansdowne Partners and CQS.

Barclays has written down more than £2.5bn on assets affected by the US sub-prime crisis mortgage crisis and subsequent credit crunch.

Its core tier one capital ratio, a key measure of its capital cushion, is expected to be near 5.5% by the end of this year, up from 5.1% at the end of 2007. This worries some analysts who think this is too low to allow the company to absorb further market shocks. The company also said it would use about half the money from the fundraising to expand its business, which also frightens some investors who think it could be looking at acquisitions.

One fund manager told The Herald that Barclays executives will now have to "put a bit of vim back" into the company's share price by producing solid financial results when it reports on August 7.