Swiss investment adviser calls on Credit Suisse chairman to quit over spying scandal
The head of a prominent Swiss investment adviser has called on Credit Suisse chairman Urs Rohner to step down, as a boardroom battle sparked by the bank spying on executives escalates.
Rohner has been locked in a power struggle with chief executive Tidjane Thiam since the revelation in September that the Swiss lender had hired a corporate espionage agency to tail a former executive after he defected to arch-rival UBS.
Vincent Kaufmann, who leads the Ethos Foundation, said today that Rohner staying on as chairman for another year as planned was not desirable.
“These cases within the management team make our doubts even stronger as to how the board is supervising the bank’s management and how the chief executive is supervising his colleagues,” Kaufmann, who has been a critic of Rohner for years, told Reuters.
“Can we afford an additional year of tensions between the chairman, the chief executive, the media and the trust of the employees and the clients? All this makes us think we need to change quicker.”
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Kaufmann also told Reuters that Thiam should leave Credit Suisse if it emerges that he was lying about his awareness of the spying, but said that Rohner should be first to quit.
Kaufmann’s comments put further pressure on the Swiss lender to overhaul its leadership team, as the bank’s investors take sides in the aftermath of the spying scandal.
It emerged yesterday that three of the bank’s top shareholders have backed Thiam in the boardroom battle following reports Rohner was drawing up a list of candidates to replace the chief executive.
The chairman of Harris Associates, which owns 8.4 per cent of the bank, said “we are at the stage now where it is one or the other” and said the company backed Thiam.
US hedge fund Eminence Capital and London-based Silchester International Investors also both threw their weight behind the chief executive.
Credit Suisse declined to comment.