MIAMI-Barclays has signed a 10-Year, 24,000-square-foot lease worth $9 million at the Mellon Financial Center on Brickell Avenue, home to Miami’s financial district. The global financial-services firm's lease negotiations, which took almost a year, were complicated by the twists and turns of the financial crisis. Barclays is a long-standing tenant at the class A office assset.

Although Barclays’ Latin American regional office had been in the building since 2000, when it first opened, and, in fact, had been the lead tenant in what was then the Barclays Financial Center, the company had been on another floor. It wanted to keep one floor, but surrender another, which it was subleasing to two other firms.

Today, Barclays, which took over Lehman Brothers’ Latin American regional office in Miami after Lehman’s demise in September of 2008, occupies the same space on the 12^th floor, as did the once formidable New York-based financial services company. But it gave back nearly 25,000 square feet on the 28th floor, says Jack Lowell, Flagler Real Estate Services vice president, who, along with Adriana Jimenez, the building’s leasing director, negotiated the transaction. That space had been sublet to Guggenheim Partners, LLC, and BDO Seidman, LLP, a couple of years ago, which are now direct tenants of the landlord, Testa Inmuebles en Renta S.A., he says.