The abrupt ouster of banking's sole black CEO

New York

LAST November, Urs Rohner, the chairman of the board of Credit Suisse, had a party in 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 hired entertainers. Mr Thiam watched as a black performer came onstage dressed as a janitor and began to dance to music. He excused himself and left the room. They eventually 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, said three guests at the party.

For Mr Thiam, now 58, the party was just one among many painful incidents in 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 mostly white industry and an overwhelmingly white city.

Profitable again

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.

In February, Credit Suisse's board forced his resignation after a deeply embarrassing surveillance scandal erupted on his watch.

When Mr Thiam's No 2 admitted he had ordered investigators to spy on employees, the chief executive found himself with few allies and no leverage to survive. His ouster attracted remarkably little notice outside Zurich, coming as it did months before a global reckoning with systemic bias.

But interviews with 11 people who worked closely with him at Credit Suisse, and five other close contacts - including clients, friends, family and investors - suggest that race was an ever-present factor during his tenure and that it helped create the conditions for his swift departure.

Credit Suisse declined comment.

After his resignation, he gave a news conference at the bank's headquarters. "Every second, I've done the best I could ... I am who I am. I cannot change who I am." He added: "It's the essence of injustice to hold against somebody what they are."

He was born in Ivory Coast to an elite family active in politics. The youngest of seven, he was raised Muslim. His mother, Marietou, parented with perfectionist standards. "Be gallant, respect the staff that work for us - on this, she was ruthless - do not lie, be punctual, do not say bad words, show solidarity," said Yamousso Thiam, Mr Thiam's sister, in an interview.

Their father, Amadou, was a journalist, a Cabinet minister and an ambassador to Morocco. When Mr Thiam was an infant, the elder Mr Thiam was jailed for three years on charges - later invalidated - of plotting against the Ivorian government. The Thiam children would long remember the injustice.

When Mr Thiam was six and conspicuously uninterested in school, one of his brothers asked the Ivorian president to intervene. There was a kind of family court, where there was an 'indictment': "He must go to school. The era of illiterate African princes and lazy kings, it is over."

In 1984, he became the first Ivorian to graduate from Paris' prestigious École Polytechnique. After earning a degree in engineering and a master's in business, he worked at the World Bank, then in the Paris office of McKinsey. In 1994, he returned to Ivory Coast to work in public service.

A few years later, he was promoted to minister of planning and development - but when a military coup deposed the president, he refused a role in the new government, and, fearing for his life, returned to Europe and the private sector.

He ran the European operations of British insurer Aviva, and in 2009, was named chief executive of the British financial services firm Prudential - the first black person to run one of the London Stock Exchange's 100 largest companies. During his tenure, Prudential's profits doubled, and its stock price tripled.

Mr Rohner, the chairman of Credit Suisse, approached him about the possibility of running the bank in 2014. It was not a job that he was eager to take up, because - as he said in an interview with Euromoney - he thought it a daunting prospect.

At the time, Credit Suisse was in a deep funk. Years after the financial crisis, it was still heavily dependent on costly trading strategies, and its wealth management unit trailed UBS, its arch-rival in Zurich. Investors were impatient with its languishing stock price. On the day Mr Thiam's hiring was announced in March 2015, Credit Suisse shares rose 7 per cent.

To bolster its private wealth management business, he tapped Iqbal Khan, 39, who had been born in Pakistan but moved to Switzerland as a child. Sources said that Mr Khan went on to buy the house next door to Mr Thiam's in an affluent Swiss suburb - which the intensely private Mr Thiam did not like.

He made an effort to embrace Zurich society. But before long, aspects of his lifestyle began to irritate the locals. With Credit Suisse making a show of cutting costs, the Swiss press began to catalogue his first-class air travel and stays in presidential suites. Expatriates who have long worked in Switzerland say the Swiss have a fine-grained aversion to public displays of wealth and regard those who flaunt it as outsiders.

At Credit Suisse's annual investor meeting in 2016, a shareholder named Ingeborg Ginsberg, a 94-year-old Holocaust survivor, questioned Mr Thiam's background. "The bank is called Suisse - Credit Suisse," she said in German. Referencing Brady Dougan, Mr Thiam's American predecessor, she added: "I asked him last year if he doesn't have a conflict of interest. I ask the same question of Thiam, if he can understand me: Does he not have a conflict of interest? I heard him mention the Third World - is that really what we want? That a good, solid, Swiss bank sinks to the level of the Third World?"

On the dais, where Mr Thiam sat next to Mr Rohner, their shock was evident. Mr Rohner interrupted. "You should not make such accusations, without declaration, in the room," he said, adding: "We do not always take foreigners, we always choose the best man for the job, and we have found that man."

By 2018, Credit Suisse's business had improved substantially. The bank was again solidly profitable, and the wealth division had overtaken UBS in some areas. Mr Thiam had resolved legal issues that preceded his tenure, settling a major US case for an amount less than Credit Suisse had expected. Euromoney named him Banker of the Year.

In predominantly white Zurich, a city of just 400,000, his powerful role and his skin colour made him stand out. He stopped driving his Porsche Cayenne to work, fearing that any run-in with another motorist, even over a parking spot, would turn into a media incident.

Things were beginning to sour inside Credit Suisse, too. Despite an improved balance sheet, Credit Suisse's shares were down, hurt by stock offerings Mr Thiam had deemed necessary to strengthen capital reserves. He told associates he felt underappreciated by board members, some of whom faulted him for Credit Suisse's lack of growth in China. News reports often drew belittling comments.

One reader of an especially critical Zurich blog called him a "fruit salesman" and added: "Go home, fool!" Another wrote: "I hope he sends his money home. Then we can classify it as development aid."

Mr Thiam would often say that he was not bothered by bad press and corporate drama. But as the year wore on, he told his associates his fear that the board wanted him out. Their unspoken message, he said, was: "You cleaned up the mess. Now leave."

Early last year, he hosted a holiday party at his home. Mr Khan had by then moved in next door, and Mr Thiam had planted trees to block the view. At the party, Mr Khan got into a spat with Mr Thiam's partner about the landscaping, upsetting her. The two men had a private word, after which Mr Khan quickly left. Neither executive will say what happened.

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. He parked and confronted the man, who turned out to be a detective from a London firm called Investigo. An argument ensued, and Mr Khan filed a police report; both Credit Suisse and the canton opened investigations. The Swiss media called it "Spygate".

Tarnished by association

At Credit Suisse, the chief operating officer, Pierre-Olivier Bouée, admitted to ordering the surveillance because he suspected Mr Khan of trying to poach employees. He resigned.

Mr Thiam, who denied 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, so the CEO'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. Mr Rohner felt obliged to publicly apologise to the Khans and the public.

Soon, more accusations surfaced, including that Credit Suisse's human resources chief had also been surveilled. Late in December, the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority opened a probe into Credit Suisse's use of investigators to monitor employees.

The repercussions of the scandal progressed with remarkable speed. On Jan 31, 2020, Bloomberg reported that Mr Rohner was looking for a new chief executive. Three large shareholders publicly came to Mr Thiam's defence. David Herro, a top executive at Harris Associates, a Chicago fund, suggested that the opposition to Mr Thiam was racially motivated, but Mr Thiam had too little support in his corner. On Feb 7, he resigned.

A Swiss member of his executive team was named his successor. As chief executive, Mr Thiam was responsible for everything at Credit Suisse, and the surveillance activity was widely viewed as despicable, but it is an open question whether a CEO from a different background might have survived.

Before he left Credit Suisse, Mr Thiam presented his final set of earnings results to the press. Towards the end of the question-and-answer session, a local reporter spoke up, saying: "The strategy was good, but the style did not speak to Swiss mentality. This is my question: Would it be different in England or another -"

Mr Thiam interrupted: "I am who I am. The same way I was born with a right hand, I cannot change being right-handed. If people don't like right-handed people, then I'm in trouble. That's all I can say, because I can't become left-handed." NYTIMES