After more than eight years as group chief executive of Standard Chartered, Peter Sands (pictured, below, right) is to step down from the role. The banking group, one of the world's most international banks, is listed on the London, Hong Kong and Indian stock exchanges.
Peter_Sands,StandardCharteredCEO
The bank has named Sands' replacement as Bill Winters, a former JP Morgan head of investment banking, who will join the group on 1 May 2015, and will be appointed to the Board as group chief executive in June 2015.
Winters will be based in London and paid an annual base salary of £1.15 million, along with a "discretionary variable compensation plan" that could add a maximum of 200 per cent of his fixed pay.
While the group may have doubled in size under Sands' leadership, in recent times it has run into trouble, with three profit warnings, and compliance costs that are mounting after it was fined more than US$600 million in 2012 by US regulators for violating anti-money laundering rules and other sanctions on Iran, Sudan, Libya and Myanmar for several years.
The Financial Times has noted that StanChart's share price has almost halved since its peak in March 2013, and more troubles lie ahead as the economies of Asia, the Middle East and Africa - the bank's focus - have been slowing in recent years, leading to a rise in bad loans.
In preparing for Sands' exit, the bank has taken the opportunity to make further changes at the top in what it called "a comprehensive package of changes to our Board":
• John Peace, chairman, is to step down during 2016 to ensure Winters has time to settle into his new role;
• Jaspal Bindra, group executive director and chief executive officer for Asia, will step down from the board with effect from 30 April 2015 and will leave the group shortly thereafter, ending a 16 year career at StanChart;
• The three longest serving independent non-executive directors, Ruth Markland, Paul Skinner and Oliver Stocken, will retire from the board during 2015, as directors are no longer considered to be independent after nine years on the same board;
• Christine Hodgson, who joined the board in September 2013, will take over from Markland as remuneration committee chair the day after the group's AGM on 6 May 2015.
Although the group has stated its "intent" to reduce the board size from 19 to 14 directors "in due course", the three board members who are leaving will be replaced by two others, with effect from 1 April. The replacements are: Gay Huey Evans, a former executive at Barclays Capital, Citi and the Financial Services Authority; and Jasmine Whitbread, chief executive of Save the Children International.