Caught in the controversy, the president of Credit Suisse resigns from his functions. Tasked with rethinking the company’s culture, Antonio Horta-Osorio leaves after having himself broken the quarantine rules linked to Covid-19. He only lasted eight and a half months at the helm of the company.
Antonio Horta-Osorio was elected president at the end of April 2021, when the bank was weakened by a series of cases. A month earlier, Credit Suisse suffered huge losses after the bankruptcy of the American fund Archegos and the British company Greensill. This case is a bad blow to the image of Credit Suisse. Faced with criticism, Antonio Horta-Osorio is responsible for restoring order within the second Swiss bank.
The Portuguese banker, a former executive of UBS, the rival bank, arrives with a solid reputation for having successfully turned around the British bank Lloyd’s.
But in December the swiss newspaper Blick reveals that the president would not have respected the rules of isolation on his return from London and before his departure to Spain, then to New York. The resignation of Antonio Horta-Osorio comes after an internal investigation commissioned by the board of directors.
Replaced by Axel Lehmann
It is another former UBS, already a member of the board of directors of Credit Suisse, Axel Lehmann, who takes over. The latter had joined the Board of Directors at the beginning of October following an extraordinary general meeting as Chairman of the Risk Management Committee. He succeeds his predecessor with “ immediate effect “, Specifies the bank in a press release issued overnight from Sunday to Monday. His election should be proposed at the general meeting at the end of April.
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