António Horta-Osório: banking’s go-to man felled by a breach of Covid rules
Credit Suisse needed someone to lead a clean-up job, and António Horta-Osório had impeccable credentials for struggling banks. During the financial crisis at Spanish bank Santander he had led the takeover of Alliance & Leicester and Bradford & Bingley when they were near collapse, and then helped pull Lloyds Bank out of the mire after its government bailout.
He was not known to object to this shining-armour reputation, displaying in his office a cartoon showing a knight on horseback rescuing two banking damsels in distress.
Yet his latest adventure has ended suddenly, after an internal Credit Suisse investigation found breaches of Covid regulations. They included admitted contravention of Swiss isolation rules. He also watched Novak Djokovic win the Wimbledon men’s final when he allegedly should have been in quarantine according to UK laws. Horta-Osório resigned over the weekend once the findings were made clear to him.
Horta-Osório was born in Lisbon in January 1964, attending Jesuit school and acquiring a love of tennis, before studying management and business administration at the Portuguese capital’s Universidade Católica Portuguesa.
He started on his banking career in 1987 at Citibank Portugal, where he rose to become head of capital markets by 1991, while also completing an MBA at France’s prestigious Insead in the same year. From there he joined US investment bank Goldman Sachs, before Spain’s Santander took him on as a chief executive of a Portuguese subsidiary in 1993.
In 2006 he made the move to the UK to head up Abbey National, the former building society bought by Santander two years earlier. During four years in charge he steered the bank through acquisitions which built up a formidable high street presence, and
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