A surveillance scandal at Credit Suisse continues to grab attention – and CEO Tidjane Thiam has found a new way to respond.
«Entirely false and defamatory,» Tidjane Thiam describes a media report on Sunday. The Credit Suisse CEO didn't send his press department to deny the report – instead he resorted to Instagram, where he began posting from a personal account last week.
Thiam said he would use the social networking platform to correct what he termed as false information. This represents a new frontier in a surveillance scandal which blew open last September and has resulted in regulatory scrutiny as well as a criminal investigation. Credit Suisse Chairman Urs Rohner as well as Thiam have pledged they had no knowledge of the spying.
A report«NZZ am Sonntag»(behind paywall, in German) appears to have sparked Thiam's Instagram response: the Swiss weekly reported that Thiam has mobbed his former top private banker, Iqbal Khan, which led the 43-year-old to quit for a job at UBS.
«Third Man» as Trigger
The subject of the mobbing was Claudio De Sanctis, a Khan ally and his top private banker in Europe until roughly 18 months ago, the outlet reported. Thiam wanted de Sanctis out, and ordered Khan to collect any damaging information on the banker, according to the report. The Italian-born de Sanctis left the Swiss bank in 2018 and recently took over Deutsche Bank's private bank.
Thiam, who began Instagramming at the Davos meeting last week, quickly deactivated comments on the controversial post after several followers called for him to step down. The Swiss financial regulator is probing «spygate» in regards to Credit Suisse's corporate governance.
