The cautionary tale of Andrea Orcel

There’s a lesson for all boardrooms — and an echo of the lost era of big-bucks, big-ego banking — in the story of Santander’s withdrawal of its job offer to Andrea Orcel. The Italian-born former UBS and Merrill Lynch investment banker was named last September as the next chief executive of the Spanish giant that is Europe’s fifth-largest commercial banking group; but during his ‘gardening leave’ between employers, the deal fell apart. The amount Orcel was demanding in compensation for deferred rewards at UBS — some reports say €50 million — turned out to be way over the top for the Spaniards. And having previously known him only as a dealmaker on their behalf, they were evidently late to catch up with his reputation as a boss — on which I commend a Financial News article from October 2018 titled ‘Angry Management: the Dark Side of Andrea Orcel’.

Finally, vanity of vanities, Orcel and Santander chairman Ana Botín had a spat (according to the FT) over whether he could attend the World Economic Forum in Davos, at which both were high-profile regulars.