The Bank of Portugal has appointed a new leader to run the ‘‘good’’ bank created after the bailout of the Portuguese lender Banco Espírito Santo, after the unexpected resignation on Saturday of its top management.
Portugal’s central bank chose Eduardo Stock da Cunha on Sunday to take over as chief executive of Novo Banco from Vítor Bento, who stepped down on Saturday along with his two main lieutenants. Mr. Bento and his team resigned abruptly after only two months in charge, citing the fact that their mandate had “significantly changed” since Mr. Bento was appointed in July to run Novo Banco’s predecessor, Banco Espírito Santo.
Mr. Stock da Cunha was set to return to Lisbon from London, where he has been an executive at Lloyd’s Banking Group. Mr. Stock da Cunha previously worked for Santander Totta, the Portuguese subsidiary of Banco Santander, Spain’s largest bank by assets.
The abrupt management reshuffle is another blow for Portuguese regulators, who have been struggling to engineer a rescue of Banco Espírito Santo after the bank was undone by its exposure to its struggling corporate parent.
The healthy assets of the bank, one of Portugal’s largest financial institutions, were transferred in early August to Novo Banco as part of a bailout and with a view to then sell Novo Banco to private investors.
In a statement late Sunday, the Bank of Portugal said its goal was that “within the shortest possible time Novo Banco may count on a stable shareholder structure.”
The central bank also appointed other senior executives, including Jorge Freire Cardoso as Novo Banco’s chief financial officer. He is a former investment banker who was most recently at Caixa Geral de Depósitos, Portugal’s state-controlled bank.
Banco Espírito Santo had been run for decades by the Espírito Santo family as part of a complex web of family-controlled companies. Regulators raised questions earlier this year about irregularities in the finances of its corporate parent, but have come under severe criticism for failing to intervene sooner and for preventing the bank from selling more debt to investors in the run-up to its collapse. Several other businesses controlled by the family have since sought creditor protection.
Mr. Bento and his colleagues were appointed to lead Banco Espírito Santo in July after Ricardo Espírito Santo Silva Salgado, the great-grandson of the founder of the family business, resigned as the bank’s executive chairman.
In their statement on Saturday, Mr. Bento and his management colleagues said that, given the change in their mandate, they ‘‘now feel that the right thing to do is to hand over the reins to another management team.’’
The Portuguese news media and analysts, however, said Mr. Bento was opposed to a plan by Carlos Costa, the governor of the central bank, to sell the revamped Novo Banco as soon as possible. The management tussle, the analysts suggested, is another blow to the reputation of Portugal as well as that of Novo Banco.
An editorial in the Portuguese newspaper Publico, which appeared over the weekend under the headline “An Irresponsible Resignation,” suggested that Mr. Bento and Mr. Costa should have put the national interest ahead of their own personal interests to avoid giving investors, at a fragile time for Novo Banco, the image of a bank caught in a “guerrilla climate.”
Novo Banco did not disclose how much Mr. Bento and his team were paid for their two months in charge.
Given his international banking experience, Mr. Stock da Cunha is seen as a strong choice, particularly in his ability to persuade international banks to bid for Novo Banco as part of the auction plan favored by the central bank. Mr. Bento is a well-respected economist who set up the country’s main payment systems processor. He was not, however, a banker.
Mr. Salgado, the former patriarch of the family business empire, had hoped to appoint his own successor to the top job. But the Bank of Portugal preferred someone without ties to Mr. Salgado’s family and opted for Mr. Bento.
Shortly after stepping down, Mr. Salgado was arrested and ordered to post bail of 3 million euros, or $3.9 million, as part of a separate investigation into possible money-laundering and tax evasion.
Banco Espírito Santo then reported a first-half loss of €3.58 billion.
The bank’s collapse was one of the first tests of new rules in Europe for handling bank failures. The regulations are intended to minimize the cost to taxpayers while preventing disruption to the financial system.
The Portuguese government lent about €4.4 billion of the €4.9 billion cost of the bailout to the country’s bank resolution fund, which is funded by financial institutions. Eventually, the new bank will be sold in the hope of recovering the taxpayer loan.
The rescue of Banco Espírito Santo came just months after Portugal itself emerged from a €78 billion, three-year bailout from the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund. The country was one of those hit hardest in the eurozone’s sovereign debt crisis.