It has been announced today that Lloyds Banking Group CEO António Horta-Osório is taking a temporary leave of absence. According to the Guardian: "the 47-year-old is thought to be suffering from fatigue due to overwork" and "is expected back before the end of the year."

We can certainly understand that is must be stressful to be a banker in these days of economic crisis and turmoil. Bloomberg quotes Bruce Packard, a banking analyst at Seymour Pierce in London saying “I have a lot of sympathy towards him. It’s easy to see how it could happen. He didn’t exactly inherit the easiest job.” Given Lloyds’ problems “it’s hardly surprising that in current market conditions things got on top of him,” said Bruce Packard.

Lloyds is 41% owned by the British public after we threw £21 bn to bail it out. The value of the public share in Lloyds had collapsed by 50% by Agust 2011 and has been further reduced since then (just yesterday they lost another 5% of their value in the wake of the news about the collapse of the plan to save the Euro). The British tax payer has threfore lost over £10 bn in LLoyds. That is enough to stress even the most resilient CEO!

So, since it is our money that is at stake we though it would be in our interest to reveal a few facts about Horta-Osório's pay and conditions:

  • he was poached by Lloyds from Santander and started in his new job on March 1 this year
  • shortly afterwards he announced 15,000 job loses by 2014, bringing the total amount of job loses at Lloyds since 2008 to 45,000
  • his total pay package is worth £13.5 m made up of: £8m annual package, £4.6m in shares and cash to poach him from Santander, plus "a gold-plated pension of up to almost £900,000 per year to compensate him for the loss of Santander’s generous final salary scheme."
  • his salary will be £1.061m, on top of which he has been awarded shares worth 420 per cent of his salary for the first year of his long-term incentive plan

One of the reports about Horta-Osorio taking leave of absence mentioned the fact that he goes "cage-diving with sharks in his leisure time", an experience which might come handy in his job as a top banking CEO.

Now, after reading this, if you want to express an opinion, you can do so in the Guardian's online poll "Do you feel sympathetic towards António Horta-Osório?"