Lone Star hired a consultancy firm to assess Novo Banco’s managers
Lone Star is already the majority owner of Novo Banco and has hired a consultancy firm to assess the management and senior executives of the bank. The result may cause changes in the administration.
The North American fund Lone Star has joined Novo Banco two months ago and one of the new shareholders’ action was to hire the human resources consultancy firm Egon Zehnder to assess the administrators and senior executives of Novo Banco’s board, ECO ascertained near sources close to the bank. The assessment is still being carried out and it should go on for another four months, after which Lone Star will decide if the current administration will remain in office or if changes will be made.
Egon Zehnder is an international consultancy firm present in Portugal that specializes in consulting services, leadership succession planning and executive assessment. A source close to the sales process told ECO that Lone Star representatives want to have a solid and consistent assessment of all teams, including both senior executives and the board, before making any decision concerning possible changes. If those changes were to be made, they would have to be enforced before October of 2018.
The new governance structure of Novo Banco has been made official on October 18th of 2017, the same day Lone Star signed the purchase contract for the bank. Novo Banco started having three management entities: General Supervisory Board (replacing the former Board of Directors), the Executive Board and the General Meeting Board.
The General Supervisory Board will be headed by the English Byron Haynes, appointed by Lone Star, who will also be the new chairman of Novo Banco. Donald Quintin, Kambiz Nourbakhsh and Benjamin Dickgiesser have also been appointed by Lone Star. In the executive team, aside from António Ramalho, will have Vítor Fernandes, Jorge Cardoso, Isabel Ferreira, Luísa Soares da Silva, Rui Fontes and José Eduardo Bettencourt.
As ECO disclosed in October, the Executive team was under assessment, but Lone Star intended to move to the executive administration some of the names that entered the General Council in October. On the spotlight should be precisely the three names appointed by Lone Star, since they were involved in the negotiations for the purchase of Novo Banco.
ECO spoke to an official source from Novo Banco about the purpose of the evaluation, but the bank refrained from commenting.
