Former CEOs’ Pay Docked For Hurting Banks’ Reputations With Scandals Of Which Banks Say They Are Wholly Innocent

Credit Suisse and Swedbank recently had to oust CEOs over unfortunate incidents—in the former case, spying on employees, and in the latter, possible Russian money laundering. But both have bent over backwards to make as clear as possible that those CEOs had done nothing really wrong, that the worst that could be said of them is that they didn’t do enough to make themselves aware of the potentially reputation-injuring matters going on beneath their noses. And by that we mean both hired law firms to exonerate both the banks themselves and those that led them. In Credit Suisse’s case, it did so before firing Tidjane Thiam, which exhaustively reviewed a whole month of correspondence between Thiam and his lieutenant/spy chief/scapegoat Pierre-Olivier Bouée before pronouncing Thiam wholly innocent of the whole affair. Swedbank was forced to part ways with Birgitte Bonnesen before having a law firm conduct a face-saving probe, but was nice enough to go easy on her all the same.