City profiles
Paul Pester The TSB chief is resisting calls to step down over his inept handling of the bank’s IT meltdown. But with the crisis now in its seventh week, says Rosamund Urwin in The Sunday Times, “the knives are out for Paul Pester”. TSB customers, the City and MPS – who grilled him again last week – are all arguing that he must go. Pester, 54, appears to have “cemented his status as the new villain of banking”. Tension between TSB’S management and its Spanish parent, Sabadell, is also reported to be “acute”. Described as “the master of the qualified apology”, Pester grew up in Cornwall and “still rides the same waves” in Newquay that “he did as a boy”. Clearly all that surfing has “taught him a lot about clinging on”. The Sainsbury’s boss was mocked in April when he was filmed singing We’re in the Money before a TV interview about the merger with Asda. “An unguarded moment,” Mike Coupe called it. He got that assessment right, says James Burton in the Daily Mail. Coupe, 57, “who masterminded the blockbuster £7.3bn tie-up”, enjoyed a 46% pay boost to £3.4m in the year to February, although profits fell by 19% over the past year. The supermarket chief enjoys “letting off steam by playing guitar” and doesn’t mind looking like a plonker when called upon to play. At one morale-boosting company convention – in a bid to boost enthusiasm for seafood sales – he strummed a version of James Blunt’s You’re Beautiful to a staff member dressed up as a crustacean named Dawn the Prawn.