Credit Suisse Group AG yesterday cleared chief executive officer Tidjane Thiam of ordering the botched surveillance of the bank’s former wealth management head Iqbal Khan, but said its chief operating officer had resigned to take responsibility.
Khan, who abruptly left in July and has just started at archrival UBS Group AG, was under surveillance by private detectives hired by Credit Suisse for seven business days, from Sept. 4 to Sept. 17, when he spotted them.
An internal investigation, carried out by the Homburger law firm, found that chief operating officer Pierre-Olivier Bouee alone initiated observation of Khan to see if he was trying to poach former colleagues to join him at UBS.
Credit Suisse chairman Urs Rohner told a news conference that Thiam still enjoyed the full confidence of the board.
“We have absolutely zero evidence that he was informed about it,” he said while apologizing to Khan and his family for the incident.
Generating sensational headlines about personal enmity between Thiam and Khan in the normally dispassionate world of Swiss private banking, the scandal has also triggered a criminal investigation and hurt the image of everyone involved.
“The board of directors considers that the mandate for the observation of Iqbal Khan was wrong and disproportionate and has resulted in severe reputational damage to the bank,” Switzerland’s second-biggest bank said in a statement.
Rohner and John Tiner, head of the board’s audit committee, batted back questions about the credibility of the report, saying the incident was unusual and insisting that Thiam was on top of what was happening at the group.
Thiam did not attend the news conference.
Two big shareholders have said they wanted Tidjane, architect of a sweeping three-year revamp at the bank he joined in 2015, to stay unless it was shown he broke the law.
The investigation did not find any evidence that Khan had attempted to poach employees or clients away from Credit Suisse.
It also did not reveal any evidence that the surveillance was related to the personal differences between Khan and Thiam as has been reported by media, a summary of the probe’s findings said.
Khan was known as the smooth and ambitious manager putting life into Thiam’s strategy of reshaping the bank into a wealth management juggernaut to rival bigger peer UBS.
Under his watch, the international wealth management business Khan led more than doubled profits and sharply boosted the client assets it handles.
However, the abrupt departure of Khan — who came to Switzerland from Pakistan at age 12 and launched a stellar career in finance — exposed a falling out with Thiam, the 57-year-old Franco-Ivorian executive who revamped a stagnant Credit Suisse by cutting thousands of jobs, scaling back investment banking and bolstering its balance sheet.
Khan’s switch to cohead wealth management at market leader UBS sealed the divorce.
Khan, 43, went to the police after the confrontation with at least one detective who was shadowing him and his wife as they drove through Zurich, Switzerland.
Conflicting versions have emerged of how the incident unfolded.
Credit Suisse named company veteran James Walker as chief operations officer to replace Bouee.
On Tuesday, US President Donald Trump weighed in on a pressing national issue: The rebranding of a restaurant chain. Last week, Cracker Barrel, a Tennessee company whose nationwide locations lean heavily on a cozy, old-timey aesthetic — “rocking chairs on the porch, a warm fire in the hearth, peg games on the table” — announced it was updating its logo. Uncle Herschel, the man who once appeared next to the letters with a barrel, was gone. It sparked ire on the right, with Donald Trump Jr leading a charge against the rebranding: “WTF is wrong with Cracker Barrel?!” Later, Trump Sr weighed
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) secured a record 70.2 percent share of the global foundry business in the second quarter, up from 67.6 percent the previous quarter, and continued widening its lead over second-placed Samsung Electronics Co, TrendForce Corp (集邦科技) said on Monday. TSMC posted US$30.24 billion in sales in the April-to-June period, up 18.5 percent from the previous quarter, driven by major smartphone customers entering their ramp-up cycle and robust demand for artificial intelligence chips, laptops and PCs, which boosted wafer shipments and average selling prices, TrendForce said in a report. Samsung’s sales also grew in the second quarter, up
HEADWINDS: Upfront investment is unavoidable in the merger, but cost savings would materialize over time, TS Financial Holding Co president Welch Lin said TS Financial Holding Co (台新新光金控) said it would take about two years before the benefits of its merger with Shin Kong Financial Holding Co (新光金控) become evident, as the group prioritizes the consolidation of its major subsidiaries. “The group’s priority is to complete the consolidation of different subsidiaries,” Welch Lin (林維俊), president of the nation’s fourth-largest financial conglomerate by assets, told reporters during its first earnings briefing since the merger took effect on July 24. The asset management units are scheduled to merge in November, followed by life insurance in January next year and securities operations in April, Lin said. Banking integration,
LOOPHOLES: The move is to end a break that was aiding foreign producers without any similar benefit for US manufacturers, the US Department of Commerce said US President Donald Trump’s administration would make it harder for Samsung Electronics Co and SK Hynix Inc to ship critical equipment to their chipmaking operations in China, dealing a potential blow to the companies’ production in the world’s largest semiconductor market. The US Department of Commerce in a notice published on Friday said that it was revoking waivers for Samsung and SK Hynix to use US technologies in their Chinese operations. The companies had been operating in China under regulations that allow them to import chipmaking equipment without applying for a new license each time. The move would revise what is known
RSS