Horta-Osorio’s broken promise the final straw at embittered Credit

By Oliver Hirt, Sumeet Chatterjee and John O’Donnell

ZURICH/FRANKFURT/HONG KONG (Reuters) – After taking over as chairman of Credit Suisse (SIX:), Antonio Horta-Osorio pledged to develop a culture of personal accountability at the Swiss bank following a string of scandals.

That promise ultimately sealed his fate as he was forced to resign after barely eight months in office for flouting coronavirus quarantine rules in both Britain and Switzerland.

It marked the end of his attempts to reform Switzerland’s second-biggest bank, still dealing with the fallout from a slew of earlier failings, from spying on executives to investment losses running into billions of dollars.

After resigning, Horta-Osorio expressed regret that his “personal actions … compromised my ability to represent the bank internally and externally”. His spokesperson said he would not be speaking to the media.

It was just days after promising to clean up the bank by creating a sense of responsibility that Horta-Osorio flew to London in a private jet to attend the Wimbledon tennis finals, breaking Britain’s coronavirus quarantine rules in the process, three people with knowledge of the matter said.

When the breach came to light at the end of last year, Horta-Osorio had already been called out for a similar quarantine transgression in Switzerland and the bank was scouring his record for any other violations.

An internal investigation also looked at the Portuguese banker’s use of company jets. He had directed a corporate plane to drop him off in the Maldives on the way back from a business trip in Asia, two people familiar with the matter said.

The episodes strengthened the hand of senior managers bristling at what they saw as his interference in strategy, making it all but impossible for the chairman to prevail in a tug-of-war with executives at the bank he had been brought in to overhaul.

UNFORGIVING BACKDROP

Horta-Osorio explained his Wimbledon lapse by saying he was unaware he had failed to get the business waiver for British rules his office had asked for, laying the blame on staff who he said did not inform him, one of the people said.

He had intended to take Credit Suisse clients to the tennis tournament and then gave two tickets to his children when customers bowed out due to the pandemic, the person said.

But his defence, coming in the wake of a public apology in December for breaking Swiss quarantine rules, fell flat.

The breaches took place against an unforgiving backdrop of growing hostility among Credit Suisse’s senior executives, many of whom resented the chairman’s efforts to reform, people familiar with the matter said.

Horta-Osorio suspected details of his transgressions were leaked by people in that group, said one of those people, describing…