ZURICH (Reuters) – Former Credit Suisse Chairman Antonio Horta-Osorio has been ordered to pay a fine of 2,000 Swiss francs ($2,178) for breaching COVID-19 quarantine regulations, Swiss newspaper Blick reported on Wednesday.
The fine is a further blow for the top banker who abruptly left Switzerland’s second-biggest bank last month after it emerged he had breached COVID-19 quarantine rules twice in 2021.
The affair was an embarrassment for the former Lloyds chief executive who had said every banker needed to be a risk manager.
The penalty order was imposed by prosecutors in the Uznach district of canton St. Gallen, the paper said. In addition to paying a fine, he must also pay court fees of 350 francs, although it was unclear whether he had accepted the punishment, the paper said.
The prosecutors’ office and a spokesperson for Horta-Osorio were unavailable for comment immediately.
Credit Suisse declined to comment. The bank has since replaced Horta-Osorio with Axel Lehmann, 62, who joined the bank’s board in October 2021 to become head of its risk committee.
Horta-Osorio left less than nine months after he joined Credit Suisse to help it deal with a series of scandals.
In December, Reuters reported that a preliminary internal bank investigation had found Horta-Osorio attended the Wimbledon tennis finals in London in July without following Britain’s quarantine rules.
The executive also broke Swiss COVID-19 rules in November by leaving the country during a 10-day quarantine period, the bank said last month.
After resigning, Horta-Osorio expressed regret that his “personal actions … compromised my ability to represent the bank internally and externally”.
Still, the 58-year-old should be able to afford the punishment. Horta-Osorio will have earned roughly 3.5 million Swiss francs during his stint at Credit Suisse, a person familiar with the matter told Reuters last month.
($1 = 0.9181 Swiss francs)
(Reporting by John Revill and John O’Donnell; Editing by Michael Shields and Brenna Hughes Neghaiwi)
