LLOYDS BANKING Group chief executive Antonio Horta-Osorio returned to work after two months’ sick leave, facing a potentially even bigger challenge turning around the partly state-owned lender than when he left.
“I am thrilled to be back and I look forward to working with my colleagues again,” Horta-Osorio said yesterday during a brief photocall outside the bank’s head office on Gresham Street in London.
Wearing a dark suit he spoke quietly and declined further comment. He made a quick return into the building, watched by staff from windows.
Lloyds has said Horta-Osorio, by his own admission a details-obsessed manager, will change his intensive working style and have fewer people reporting to him than the previous 13. The 47-year-old Portuguese, who took over as CEO in March, had been working on a turnaround strategy including 15,000 job cuts.
Since he went sick, the euro zone debt crisis has worsened and worries have grown about the pace of recovery in Britain, where Lloyds is the biggest retail bank and has more than 30 million customers.
As part of the overhaul, Lloyds is in talks to sell its operations in the United Arab Emirates, with Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank (ADCB) emerging as the favourite to pick up the business, sources said. The bank confirmed it is considering options for its Middle Eastern unit, which had assets of 6.1 billion UAE dirhams ($1.7 billion) in 2010 and is covered from its one branch in Dubai.
ADCB, the third largest bank in Abu Dhabi by market value, appears the most likely acquirer of the business as the bank looks to expand its retail banking operations in the Gulf Arab country.
Horta-Osorio said his absence was due to sleep deprivation, which would have taken him to exhaustion if he had not stopped work, but from which he had recovered.
“From the moment I stopped (work) and started sleeping I recovered very fast,” he told a Portuguese newspaper in an interview published over the weekend.
“I probably dedicated myself a tad too much and took things too personally, neglected all rest, and focused totally on the bank,” he told Expresso newspaper. – (Reuters)
