Credit Suisse’s Fix-It Banker Lost His Standing as a Role Model

From the day he took over as chairman at Credit Suisse Group AG in May of last year, António Horta-Osório made no secret that he planned to take a tough, hands-on approach to the role. In his decades running financial institutions, he’d never experienced a bank in crisis quite like Credit Suisse, he said at the annual shareholders meeting.

The 166-year-old bank had staggered from one humiliation to another. First there was a corporate spying scandal involving senior executives, then the collapse of Chinese client Luckin Coffee. Even more disastrous was Credit Suisse’s involvement with doomed finance company Greensill Capital and its billions of dollars of losses from the implosion of one of its trading customers, Archegos Capital Management.