Ex-Credit Suisse chief Thiam takes first step in campaign to lead Ivory Coast

Former Credit Suisse CEO Tidjane Thiam is running to lead the Democratic Party of Ivory Coast. Keystone / Alexandra Wey

Nearly a quarter of a century after fleeing a coup in his native Ivory Coast, Tidjane Thiam, who built a high-flying business career running Aviva, Prudential and Credit Suisse, will on Saturday take the first step in a campaign to become president of the west African country.

Thiam, who stepped down as Credit Suisse chief executive in 2020 after a corporate espionage scandal, is running to become leader of one of the country’s main political parties, the centre-right Democratic Party of Ivory Coast (PDCI). If successful, he has a strong chance of becoming the party’s candidate in the 2025 elections.

Contacted by phone this week while he was driving through villages in the east of the country, which he described as just as poor as they were in the 1960s, Thiam told the Financial Times it was not the time to speak publicly.

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“I’m focused on the people who actually vote,” he said, referring to the PDCI’s roughly 6,000 delegates who will choose among up to five candidates on Saturday, assuming no consensus is reached first.

Rough and tumble of politics

“I’m not running a national campaign at this stage,” he said, adding that his candidacy had already unnerved the incumbent, Alassane Ouattara, who also moved from international banking to Ivorian politics.

A presidential spokesperson declined to comment on Thiam’s candidacy but said: “This administration encourages a diversity of political parties, which can compete on a level playing field under the rule of law”.

A person familiar with Thiam’s ambitions said the former Credit Suisse chief, the first black executive to head a large European bank, was nervous about the rough-and-tumble world of Ivorian politics, where personal threats to candidates are common. In the aftermath of the 2020 election, when Ouattara won a controversial third term as president, more than 50 people died in post-election violence. “He’s terrified about his security,” the person said.

Sebastian van Baalen, assistant professor at Sweden’s Uppsala University and an Ivorian politics specialist, said Thiam had strengths as a potential challenger. At 61, “he’s relatively young in the Ivorian presidential landscape”, which is dominated by older politicians, he said. Ouattara is 81, and the PDCI leadership became vacant following the death in August of former president Henri Konan Bédié at the age of 89.

Family ties

In the mid-1990s, Thiam left management consultant McKinsey to serve under Bédié as head of the National Bureau for Technical Studies and Development, an economic advisory body to the president. He later became minister for planning and development.

Francis Alain Konan, who runs a family rubber business in Ivory Coast and who supports Thiam, played down the former banker’s long absence from the country, saying his family had strong name recognition. Thiam’s mother was the niece of Félix Houphouët-Boigny, the country’s independence leader and first president.

“Thiam is the most serious challenger because of the family ties with the Boigny family,” said Konan.

“He has a cultural and academic background that is very admired here,” he said, adding that Thiam’s international trajectory matched that of Ouattara, who was a senior IMF official and governor of the regional west African central bank before becoming president in 2010.

Van Baalen said that if Thiam became leader of the PDCI, he would have time before the 2025 election “to take over the machinery of a fairly well-run party”. Thiam was “untainted by Ivorian politics of the past 20 years”, he said, a period in which the country has been through two civil wars and become more divided along ethnic lines.

Trading losses

Political opponents have portrayed Thiam as having parachuted in from Paris with a sense of entitlement. As a dual French-Ivorian national, they have also pointed out he would need to give up his French citizenship to run, something he has said he is prepared to do.

Thiam’s career in finance has also been blemished. Critics claimed there was lax oversight during his five-year tenure at Credit Suisse, which preceded a series of catastrophic risk-management failures by the bank culminating in the collapse of the 167-year-old Swiss lender in March.

These included alleged fraud in connection with $10 billion of supply chain finance funds linked to the defunct lender Greensill Capital and a $5.5 billion trading loss linked to the implosion of family office Archegos.

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Thiam has sought to distance himself from those scandals, saying he had attempted to lead a cultural overhaul and a crackdown on bankers taking excessive risks. “I’m quite proud that none of that happened under my watch,” he said in an interview last year.

Private sector credentials

He was also censured by British financial regulators in 2013 as chief executive of UK insurer Prudential for failing to inform them of a large acquisition in Asia and thereby not behaving in “an open and co-operative way”.

In his speeches, Thiam has emphasised his private sector credentials, saying that helping small and medium-sized enterprises to flourish was the key to economic growth.

Though Ivory Coast’s economy has recovered quickly from civil wars in 2002 and 2011, about two-thirds of the population is engaged in agriculture, including cocoa production.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2023