February 21, 2008
Marcel Ospel meets the equity culture
Further to my post the other day on the remarkable staying power of Marcel Ospel, the chairman of UBS, it seems the clock is ticking.
By cutting his term of office - and those of all board members - from three years to one, UBS is throwing a sop to investors who would like him to step down.
More generally, the problem of managerial entrenchment has always seemed to me to be bigger at continental European companies than those in the UK and US, where terms of office on board can often be short.
The tide is, however, moving in the Anglo-Saxon direction. It is bound to do so, given that investors have become more active and obstreperous in countries such as Germany and France.
There is a sort of irony here. The continental European institutions that have been the keenest to bring an “equity culture” to their countries have been the big banks such as Deutsche Bank and UBS. They have tried to break out of low-profit domestic retail banking into the volatile world of international investment banking.
Live by the sword, die by the sword.
It seems nobody wants the top job at the Union Bank of Singapo….er, sorry, of Switzerland …
as Philipp Hildebrand (of the Swiss National Bank) wants to stay at the SNB, and the other favourite, board member Sergio (?) Marchionne who runs Fiat, also declined, but consented to be no.2 at the bank, parttime.
And now the bank board has proposed that Ospel remains in his job for a further year.
The most respected Swiss economics and business commentator for many years now, Gerhard Schwarz of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung described Ospel in an article on Feb 9th as a “Sesselkleber” - a derogatory word for someone who remains glued to his job/post, refusing to move out. And a new word has appeared in the Swiss media : “verospeln” - a play on Ospel’s name, meaning to serve up a GAU (Grösster Anzunehmender Unfall - an MCA max. credible accident) by speculating and risk-taking which went badly wrong.
Despite the anger of some Swiss pension funds, it seems certain that Ospel has the support of the two big foreign investors from Singapore and the Middle East, so will probably be reelected at the shareholders’ meeting on Feb 27th.
Posted by: fh | February 21st, 2008 at 8:11 pm | Report this comment