EXCLUSIVE: Peter Burt to stand down early
By Ian Fraser
Sunday Herald
May 5th, 2002
PETER Burt is stepping down early as executive deputy chairman of HBOS to become a partner with the New York-based boutique investment bank Gleacher & Co.
Burt took on the HBOS deputy chairman role last September, when the Bank of Scotland, where he was chief executive, merged with the Halifax to become the UK’s fifth largest bank.
The bank said last May that Burt would remain as an executive director for 18 months to two years to oversee integration and credit quality before moving on to a non-executive role. But now Burt appears to have had enough, and will be stepping down at least six months early. “He will step down this September to take a bigger role with Gleacher & Co in Europe,” said a City source close to the matter.
It is understood Burt will remain as a non-executive director of HBOS, which holds its annual shareholder meeting on May 15.
Burt joined Gleacher & Co as a non-executive partner two years ago. The boutique, which controversially advised Bank of Scotland on its proposed deals with both NatWest and Halifax, is currently advising stockbrokers Cazenove on their initial public offering. It is also advising the rump of accountants Arthur Andersen on survival strategies.
Burt’s early departure comes as no surprise to bank insiders, who have been aware he has been delegating aspects of integration to colleagues. The banker, who is 58 and who joined the bank in 1975 after a stint with Hewlett-Packard in Palo Alto, California, has been finding more time to play golf at Muirfield, near his East Lothian home.
But HBOS group communications head Shane O’Riordain said: “Peter Burt is very busily engaged in driving forward to integration process, and will continue to be very engaged in that for the foreseeable future.”
Last April, at a meal known as “Burt’s last supper” – also attended by Gleacher & Co’s London partner Sir John Craven – Burt decided there was a danger that at 57 he would be a “quasi-lame-duck” if he became chief executive of the merged bank. He chose instead to step back in favour of Halifax chief executive James Crosby, facilitating the merger and perhaps also enhancing the chances of HBOS’s head office remaining in Edinburgh.
Burt told the Sunday Herald last December: “The sensible thing was for me to bugger off.” But he was encouraged to stay on for the sake of stability and to oversee integration. He was given the joint role of BoS Governor – meaning his signature appears on the bank’s notes – and executive deputy chairman of HBOS.
After working through three big proposed banking deals, Burt’s experience of corporate finance should be valuable to Gleacher & Co. Gleacher was founded as a boutique investment bank in 1990 and was acquired by NatWest for $135m in 1996. Burt’s Bank of Scotland paid around $13.5m to take a 10% stake in a management buy-out of Gleacher in April 1999. Burt’s son Hamish is an employee at Gleacher’s New York office.
Founder, Eric Gleacher, a Wall Street veteran and former US marine, features in the book Barbarians at the Gate. He cut his investment banking teeth with Lehman Brothers and Morgan Stanley but was unavailable for comment.
Other European partners at Gleacher’s include Craven, formerly of Deutsche Morgan Grenfell, Justin Dowley, Robert A. Engel, Alton F. Irby III, Simon Murray and Michael Pescod. Earlier this year Gleacher hired Tremont Advisers’s former chief investment strategist Bruce Ruehl to oversee a move into hedge funds.
Last November, Burt sold HBOS shares to the value of £2m in a move that fuelled talk that he was intending to retire earlier than expected.
Since exercising a 275,000-share option and disposing of a £2m tranche of shares at 825p each, Burt has boosted his total HBOS holding to 529,383 shares, valued at £4.4m at Friday’s close. At HBOS’s annual meeting on May 15, Lord Simpson of Marconi will step down as a non-executive director. HBOS has yet to find a successor.
Copyright SMG Sunday Newspapers Ltd. 2002
Short URL: https://www.ianfraser.org/?p=167
Posted by Ian Fraser
on May 5 2002. Filed under Article Library.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0.
You can leave a response or trackback to this entry