Credit Suisse CEO plans to step down as result of corporate spying scandal
Credit Suisse said Friday that chief executive Tidjane Thiam will step down, the biggest casualty of a corporate spying scandal that has tainted the Swiss bank’s reputation since it first emerged in October.
Thiam will resign Feb. 14 after presenting the bank’s latest financial results, the company said. He will be succeeded by Thomas Gottstein,
a longtime veteran of the company who leads its Swiss operations.
Thiam, who joined the Zurichbased bank in 2015 with a charge of turning the company around, was cleared of wrongdoing in the spying scandal involving a former employee last year.
But since then, more reports about surveillance efforts have emerged in the press, raising questions about their extent and why Thiam was not aware of them.
The bank has been in the grip of a high-powered tussle, as some shareholders threw their support behind the chief executive and demanded the resignation of chairman Urs Rohner.
At the same time, Credit Suisse is being investigated by the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory
Authority for the surveillance activities.
Thiam on Friday maintained again that he knew nothing of the spying efforts.
“I had no knowledge of the observation of two former colleagues,” he said in a statement.
“It undoubtedly disturbed Credit Suisse and caused anxiety and hurt,” he added. “I regret that this happened, and it should never have taken place.”
During his tenure, Thiam managed to steady profit at the bank, where a drive for revenue at any cost had pushed traders to take outsize positions in risky and hardto-sell securities. Rohner, the chairman, credited him with Credit Suisse’s “very solid foundation” in a statement Friday.
Thiam turned Credit Suisse away from the volatility of its investment bank by embracing its more reliable wealth management division. That strategy appeared to be working: The bank reported a doubling of profit in the third quarter of last year.
But the department that had helped this turnaround produced an embarrassing episode of corporate surveillance, which led to the resignation
of the bank’s chief operating officer, PierreOlivier Bouée, in October.
Bouée had ordered Credit Suisse’s head of security services to track Iqbal Khan, its former head of wealth management, who had left the bank for competitor UBS after a personal disagreement with Thiam.
Khan was followed in order to see if he was trying to poach employees or clients, which would
have been a breach of his Credit Suisse contract. But the investigation turned messy after Khan confronted the corporate spy outside a Zurich restaurant in midSeptember last year.
Khan then filed a criminal complaint, which led to an investigation by Zurich’s public prosecutor. The spying efforts had not produced any evidence that Khan was trying to poach employees or clients.