10/03/2020
From The New York Times news section:
The Short Tenure and Abrupt Ouster of Banking’s Sole Black C.E.O.
Tidjane Thiam made Credit Suisse profitable again. But the Swiss rejected him as an outsider, and a sudden scandal took him down.
By Kate Kelly
Oct. 3, 2020, 5:00 a.m. ETLast November, Urs Rohner, the chairman of the board of Credit Suisse, had a party at a Zurich restaurant to celebrate his 60th birthday. Among the scores of friends, family and business associates who gathered, attendees say, there was a single Black guest: Tidjane Thiam, the bank’s chief executive.
The festivities had a Studio 54 theme, with 1970s costumes and hired entertainers. Mr. Thiam watched as a Black performer came onstage dressed as a janitor, and began to dance to music while sweeping the floor. Mr. Thiam excused himself and left the room. His partner and another couple at his table, including the chief executive of the British drug company GSK, followed.
Eventually they returned to the party, only to be astonished again. A group of Mr. Rohner’s friends took the stage to perform their own musical number, all wearing Afro wigs. (Mr. Rohner declined to comment on the events, which were described by three guests.)
For Mr. Thiam, now 58, the party was just one in a series of painful incidents that shaped his five years atop Credit Suisse, when he was the only Black chief executive in the top tier of banking. Some moments were shocking, others disturbing; most had to do with tensions around being Black in a predominantly white industry and an overwhelmingly white city.
A tall, reserved, bespectacled polyglot, Mr. Thiam did the job he was hired to do: He made Credit Suisse profitable again after a long decline. But he never had to stop fighting for acceptance and respect, both within the bank and in Switzerland generally. At a shareholders meeting, his background was denigrated as “third world.” A subordinate purchased the home next to his, which was taller and looked directly into Mr. Thiam’s windows.
Why doesn’t Switzerland have sumptuary laws anymore to prevent non-Black executive vice presidents from buying houses that are taller than those of Black CEOs?
His restructuring plan involved thousand [sic] of layoffs and paring back sales and trading, making many employees nervous for their jobs. It was an executive he promoted, however, who gave Mr. Thiam one of his first unsettling experiences in Switzerland.
To bolster Credit Suisse’s private wealth management business, he had tapped Iqbal Khan, 39, who had been born in Pakistan but moved to Switzerland as a child. The two were discussing strategy one day late in 2015, according to people familiar with the incident, when Mr. Khan announced that he’d bought the house next door to Mr. Thiam’s in Herrliberg, a suburb with lofty prices and views of Lake Zurich. Mr. Thiam asked Mr. Khan if he was serious. Mr. Khan said yes.
Later, Mr. Thiam told friends and colleagues that the news disturbed him. Fiercely private, he was going through a divorce, and he was leery of a subordinate having a view of his low-slung property. As a C.E.O., he didn’t relish the idea of being literally looked down upon. …
Mr. Thiam was closer to the precipice than he knew. In early 2019, he hosted a holiday party at his home. Mr. Khan had by then moved in next door, and Mr. Thiam had planted trees to obstruct the view. At the party, Mr. Khan got into a heated discussion with Mr. Thiam’s partner about the landscaping, upsetting her, and the two men stepped downstairs for a private word. Mr. Khan quickly left the scene.
Neither executive will say exactly what transpired. But later that year, Mr. Khan shocked Zurich by decamping to UBS. Wealth management had been the most successful aspect of Mr. Thiam’s tenure, and now his star executive would be working for the bank’s biggest competitor.
That September, Mr. Khan and his wife were driving to lunch at a Zurich restaurant when they noticed they were being followed. Mr. Khan parked and confronted the man, who turned out to be a detective from a Swiss firm called Investigo. An argument ensued, during which each party has since accused the other of becoming physically aggressive. Mr. Khan filed a police report, and both Credit Suisse and the canton opened investigations.
“Spygate,” as the Swiss media called it, was a sensation. At Credit Suisse, the chief operating officer, Pierre-Olivier Bouée, admitted to ordering the surveillance, saying he had suspected Mr. Khan of trying to poach employees. He resigned. Mr. Thiam, who denied any knowledge of the spy games, was cleared. But Mr. Bouée was not just his No. 2; he had followed Mr. Thiam to the bank from Prudential, and the chief executive’s name was deeply tarnished by association.
The incident was a debacle for all of Credit Suisse, an institution that was a source of great national pride. A contract worker who had been involved in hiring Investigo died by suicide. Mr. Rohner felt obliged to publicly apologize to the Khans and the Swiss public. …
The repercussions of the scandal progressed with remarkable speed. … On Feb. 7, he resigned. A Swiss member of his executive team was named his successor. …
For his sister Yamousso, one question about the Swiss still lingers. “I would be curious to know,” she said, “if today they’d finally have the honesty to recognize that seeing a Black man at the top of one of their most prestigious companies was unbearable.”
In summary, Ivorian CEO and Pakistani underling get involved in a scandalous clash, but white Swiss people are to blame.
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