He was described as the unacceptable face of banking before walking away with £2 million from Barclays in the wake of the Libor interest rate-rigging scandal.

But according to Bob Diamond, he's not really interested in money.

In an interview, the businessman, who is estimated to have earned at least £120m since joining the bank's board in 2005, said: "This is going to sound arrogant, but I never did anything for money. I never set money as a goal. It was a result."

Mr Diamond, who lives in a £23.8m apartment next to New York's Central Park, also sought to play down any impression he enjoys a lavish lifestyle, saying he has no fancy cars. He has created a family foundation which gives millions of pounds to education projects.

But he also appeared to suggest he was struggling to adapt to life without an entourage of helpers.

"All of a sudden, if you scream fire, there's no-one there," he said.

Mr Diamond, 61, left the bank in July after the scandal, which related to the manipulation of the rates at which banks are prepared to lend to each other in the wholesale money markets.

In the interview he claimed he knew nothing about how the interbank interest rate was set.

Mr Diamond said: "Do you want the truth? Up until all of this, I didn't even know the mechanics of how Libor was set."

He said he had tried to "move on" from the episode that saw him excoriated by MPs and prompted a radical revamp of the top tier of Barclays.

After he quit, Chancellor George Osborne said he hoped it was "the first step towards a new culture of responsibility in British banking".