Gilbert quits job at £550bn savings titan
Shake-up puts co-chief Keith Skeoch in sole charge of firm
VETERAN investor Martin Gilbert is standing down as joint chief executive of Standard Life Aberdeen (SLA), leaving his colleague Keith Skeoch solely in charge.
Gilbert will stay on as an executive director, focused on working with important clients and bringing in new customers.
It ends a power-sharing agreement introduced when the firm was created by an £11bn merger of Gilbert’s Aberdeen Asset Management and Skeoch’s Standard Life in 2017.
The tie-up was seen as a way to fend off rivals in a tough market for fund managers.
But the share price has since fallen 42pc and savers have pulled out billions of pounds and invested elsewhere instead.
Another £40.9bn was withdrawn from SLA last year, equal to 7pc of its overall assets, leaving it with £551.5bn at the end of 2018.
The combined group had £670bn of assets on its books at the time of the merger.
Profits dipped 1.5pc to £650m last year, but the company hiked its total annual dividend by 1.4pc to 21.6p per share.
The shake-up at the top comes after SLA hired City grandee Sir Douglas Flint as its chairman.
Flint, who previously chaired HSBC, had been widely expected to review Skeoch and Gilbert’s roles after starting in January.
Gilbert co-founded Aberdeen in 1983 and has spent the subsequent 36 years at the firm. In January he hinted that he was planning to take a back seat, saying that at 63 he was the secondoldest chief executive of a FTSE 100 firm.
Although the change involves giving up control of the company, Gilbert will remain on a lucrative pay packet. The married fatherof-three’s base salary of £600,000 will not change, but the maximum bonus he can receive will be cut from £3.6m to £2.1m. SLA’s chief finance officer Bill Rattray is retiring after 34 years. He will be replaced by Stephanie Bruce, currently a partner at PwC, on a pay packet worth up to £2.4m. She is being given £750,000 of shares as a golden hello.
The maximum pay for 62-yearold Skeoch is unchanged at £ 4.3m a year. SLA’s performance continues to worry analysts, suggesting Skeoch has a tough job to convince the City he can right the ship.
It was dealt a huge blow last year when Lloyds cancelled a contract for it to look after £109bn of pension funds.
This decision has triggered a bitter spat between the two sides which could end up in court.
Nicholas Hyett, of trading firm Hargreaves Lansdown, said: ‘The company can’t afford to lose too much institutional money, which probably explains why Martin Gilbert is being kept firmly within the fold.
‘Gilbert built Aberdeen Asset Management on relationships with global institutions, and he remains key to maintaining those relationships and winning new business.’
SLA shares rose 2.4pc, or 5.8p, to 250.8p.