Sir Hector Sants, the former head of the UK’s financial regulator and now a top executive at Barclays, is taking three months’ leave of absence because of “exhaustion and stress”.
Sir Hector – who was brought in to Barclays last year following a succession of regulatory and legal problems – was spearheading an effort to create a group-wide compliance function within the bank.
His diagnosis is an echo of what happened to António Horta-Osório, the Lloyds Banking Group chief executive, two years ago.
The Portuguese banker, who joined Lloyds from Santander, took a leave of absence from October 2011 to the end of the year on the advice of doctors. He returned to work in January 2012 and has suffered no repeat problems.
For Barclays, the news is a setback for its efforts to reform its regulatory and compliance work. The bank remains embroiled in a clutch of investigations, notably probes into the bank’s 2008 capital raising in Qatar.
Sir Hector is expected to return to work in the new year, colleagues said.
Before joining Barclays, he was chief executive of the Financial Services Authority, the now defunct regulator whose prudential supervisory functions were folded into the Bank of England and reborn as the Prudential Regulation Authority.
Friends said that, after five years heading the FSA through the financial crisis and an intense period at Barclays since starting in his job in January, Sir Hector needed time off to recover.
Two people close to the situation said there had been fractious relationships in recent months with some other senior Barclays executives.
In addition, Barclays’ recent £5.8bn rights issue had been draining, bankers said. The group was unexpectedly bounced into raising fresh capital after the Prudential Regulation Authority said its leverage ratio was too low. Sir Hector was closely involved in that transaction.
Friends said Sir Hector’s health had visibly deteriorated in recent months to the point that he had sought medical advice.
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