Credit Suisse C.E.O. Tidjane Thiam to Step Down – The New York Times

Credit Suisse said on Friday that its 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.

Mr. Thiam will resign on 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.

Mr. Thiam, who joined the Zurich-based 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 Mr. 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 the chairman, Urs Rohner.

At the same time, Credit Suisse is being investigated by the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority for the surveillance activities.

Mr. 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, Mr. 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 hard-to-sell securities. Mr. Rohner, the chairman of the board, credited him with Credit Suisse’s “very solid foundation” in a statement on Friday.

Mr. 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, Pierre-Olivier Bouée, in October.

Mr. 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 a competitor, UBS, after a personal disagreement with Mr. Thiam.

Mr. 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 Mr. Khan confronted the corporate spy outside a Zurich restaurant in mid-September last year.

Mr. 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 Mr. Khan was trying to poach employees or clients.

An investigation commissioned by Credit Suisse, conducted by an outside law firm, found that Mr. Thiam and other executives had not been aware of the surveillance effort. In October, Mr. Rohner said, “We strongly reject any and all assertions made over the last days that call into question the personal and professional integrity of our C.E.O.”

But the incident was damaging for the bank, which had spent years trying to put its house in order, only to be faced with questions about whether its chief executive was out of the loop on a corporate spying effort and, if he was, what else might be happening under his management that he did not know about.

Then in December, the Swiss newspaper Neue Zuercher Zeitung reported that Peter Goerke, a former head of human resources at Credit Suisse, had been followed just before he left the management board, an indication that the surveillance of Mr. Khan was not an isolated incident. The same month, another former executive, Colleen Graham, said that she believed she had been surveilled in 2017 in retaliation for her stance on an accounting issue, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Earlier this month, another Swiss newspaper, SonntagsZeitung, reported that Credit Suisse had also spied on Greenpeace, after the environmental group disrupted the bank’s annual shareholder meeting in 2017.

The bank declined to comment on the more recently reported incidents of spying on Friday. When the case with Mr. Khan became public, Mr. Rohner admitted that the scandal had tarnished both the reputation of the bank and Swiss banking.

The company will hand the reins to a familiar executive in Mr. Gottstein, who has been at the firm for more than 20 years and has worked in the investment banking and private banking divisions.

“Based on his deep and comprehensive experience in our business and in view of his impressive performance as head of our Swiss bank and his respect amongst our clients and employees, Thomas Gottstein is excellently positioned to lead Credit Suisse into the future,” Mr. Rohner said.

Credit Suisse shares fell on Friday after Mr. Thiam’s resignation was announced.