Davos is no place for a comeback by the failed kings of finance; Too early to forgive those reinventing themselves for a post-crisis world

Davos is no place for a comeback by the failed kings of finance
By Patrick Jenkins
Too early to forgive those reinventing themselves for a post-crisis world, says Patrick Jenkins
There might be hope yet for Fred Goodwin. Evidence is accumulating that the men at the top of big western banks when the financial crisis of 2007-08 took hold are reinventing themselves for a post-crisis world.
This month Sandy Weill, creator of the vast Citigroup empire that became the biggest US bank casualty in the crisis, popped up as chairman of the new Bermudan reinsurance group Hamilton. The business, neatly enough, specialises in catastrophe cover.
Just before Christmas Bob Diamond – unceremoniously ejected from Barclays in the summer of 2012 over his involvement in 2008 Libor manipulation – emerged with a bold business plan to break into African banking. Teaming up with the Ugandan entrepreneur Ashish Thakkar, Mr Diamond made an oblique but splashy return to prominence, floating an acquisition vehicle,Atlas Mara, in London.
Earlier last year Martin Sullivan, chief executive of the insurance group AIG when it became the biggest financial company to fail and be bailed out, was appointed chairman of a Lloyd’s of London underwriter, the ultimate symbol of the City establishment.
Is the world forgiving and forgetting?
The narrative is not so straightforward. For a start, none of the three reinvented financiers is doing a really big job. What is more, none of them was at the extreme end of those tarnished by the crisis. In comparison with many rivals, Barclays survived relatively unscathed in the tumult. At Citi, Mr Weill had ceased to be chief executive in 2003 (though he remained chairman until 2006). And Mr Sullivan only took charge of AIG a year before the crisis, inheriting an unmanageable byzantine empire from its architect Hank Greenberg.
They are far from the first to return to the fold, either. Mr Sullivan was actually one of the earliest to re-emerge post-crisis, appointed deputy chairman of the giant insurance broker Willis in 2010 – albeit for barely two years.
Some of the bankers to stage the quickest comebacks after the crisis were ironically also some of the most vociferously criticised for their mismanagement of it.
Marcel Rohner, accused of “staggering ignorance” by a British parliamentary committee, left UBS under such a cloud that you might have thought his career irrecoverable. Yet three years ago he was appointed to the board of UBS’s Swiss rival Union Bancaire Privée, one of the country’s top private banks.
Mr Rohner’s former UBS colleague, the investment banking boss Huw Jenkins, has also bounced back and is now a senior figure at the thriving Brazilian bank BTG Pactual.
Others have enjoyed rapid rehabilitation outside banking and finance. In early 2008, after being lambasted and ousted as chief executive of Merrill Lynch, Stan O’Neal was appointed to the board of the aluminium giant Alcoa, where he remains a non-executive.
Andy Hornby barely had time for a holiday after leaving the foundering HBOS upon its takeover by Lloyds, before he pitched up as chief executive of the drugs group Alliance Boots in 2009. He is now CEO of Coral, the bookmaker.
Comebacks, some of them reasonably successful, clearly outnumber the opposite public response – vilification and ostracism. Jail sentences are rare. A couple of Icelandic bank bosses and the former head of Germany’s IKB are among the few to have been tried and convicted.
Nonetheless, the vast majority of former high-flying bankers are today low-profile also-rans, many of them with face-saving roles as advisers – Johnny Cameron, the former investment banking boss at Royal Bank of Scotland, is at Gleacher Shacklock; Eric Daniels, the old head of Lloyds, is at StormHarbour. Rodrigo Rato, the former Spanish economy minister and managing director of the International Monetary Fund, who oversaw the failure of Bankia, has been reduced to sitting on an 11-member international advisory board at Santander.
Dick Fuld, the man at the helm of Lehman Brothers when it collapsed, tried valiantly enough to reinvent himself. In 2009 he founded Matrix Advisors, a mergers and acquisitions advisory boutique, but it came to little. Jimmy Cayne, the former head of Bear Stearns, seems to have devoted himself to playing bridge.
For Mr Goodwin – the former head of Royal Bank of Scotland who became the most reviled of all bankers – redemption still looks elusive. He was ignominiously stripped of his knighthood in a populist swipe by Prime Minister David Cameron a year ago. And the one modest role he did get – as a consultant to a local Scottish architecture practice – ended after there proved to be insufficient work to occupy him.
Even among those who have reinvented themselves successfully, few can claim fully fledged reintegration into the echelons of the great and the good. Just look around the delegates at this week’s annual jamboree of capitalism in Davos. Mr Jenkins is there. Mr Diamond is there.
But these are rare examples of real comeback ambition. The vast majority of the old stars seem unwilling or unable to shine again.