Grooming the Italian way

Yuri Tverskoy leaves IMB

Today is the last working day of the Chairman of the Board of the International Moscow Bank, Yuri Tverskoy. Yesterday, the IMB board of directors granted his request for resignation. Deputy Chairman of the Board Helmut Bernkopf will act as head of the credit institution. As stated by IMB official representative Sergei Levskoy, “the decision to resign is due to personal reasons, the shareholders will announce the appointment of a new chairman of the board later.” Market participants attribute the resignation to disagreements between the bank's shareholder and Mr. Tversky regarding the management of IMB.

“We are very sorry that Yuri Tverskoy is leaving IMB. He has worked in the bank since 1989 and is one of the creators of the IMB success story. We express our gratitude to Mr. Tverskoy for his enormous contribution to the development of IMB,” commented the Chairman of the Board of Directors of the bank, Erich Hampel, on his resignation. Yuri Tverskoy has worked at the bank since its founding, and in November 2006, after the resignation of IMB head Ilkki Salonen, he became head of the board of the credit institution. “For the last six years, I have served as Deputy Chairman of the Board at the bank and, together with Mr. Salonen, made all decisions regarding the bank’s activities. So it would be strange if I immediately began to change the bank’s policy, which in many respects I myself had determined,” Mr. Tverskoy said in an interview with Vremya Novostey immediately after his appointment. — As far as I understand, our shareholders do not expect any fundamental changes in the activities of IMB. As before, the bank will develop as a universal credit organization, with an emphasis on retail products and services.”

“This is a very unexpected decision, at least for bank employees,” the newspaper’s interlocutor at IMB said yesterday. “We talked with Mr. Tversky a month ago, and then he had no intention of leaving the bank,” notes another interlocutor, the head of a large Russian bank.

According to the newspaper’s interlocutor close to the bank, Mr. Tverskoy’s views greatly diverged from the views of the IMB shareholder (the Italian banking group UniCredit owns 100% of its shares) about the further development of the credit organization. “And although outwardly the bank has not changed too much recently, many employees began to leave. This was due to the fact that UniCredit began to build its management structure in a new way; many foreigners came to work at the bank and began to occupy leading positions in IMB, and the old team did not like this too much. It seems that Mr. Tverskoy tried to the last to convince shareholders that it is better to rely on management who knows the local market well than on foreign specialists. However, he failed to do this,” the interlocutor believes.

Natalia ROMANOVA