HE is the banker who loathes not winning.
As Stephen Hester announced plans to leave the part-taxpayer-owned Royal Bank of Scotland with a pay-off of up to £5.8 million, he admitted his five years at the helm represented only a "qualified victory".
The outgoing chief executive accepted the story of turning around the Edinburgh institution he took over from disgraced former chief executive Fred Goodwin has not been completed.
RBS was teetering on the brink of collapse with a rock-bottom share price under Goodwin at the end of a 2008 before it received a £45 billion state bail-out from the Labour Government. Under his guidance, the bank has become largely safe and secure and has even started making a profit.
This has come at a massive cost in the retrenchment of RBS from a proud international institution and investment banking behemoth into a slimmed-down UK-focused lender.
The biggest price, of course, has been paid by the 30,000 RBS workers, many of them based in Scotland, who have lost their jobs.
But Mr Hester's job has not yet been finished. RBS remains 81% taxpayer-owned. Worse than this, any sell-off is likely to see the Government make a substantial loss. "The job is not completed. I certainly have some human regret about not completing it," Mr Hester said last night.
While acknowledging that running RBS has been a "bruising" experience, it is clear the decision to go was not Mr Hester's.
He wanted to oversee RBS as the Government sold off its stake. Its directors, and it seems the Treasury, had other ideas. "The board wants to put in place a fresh face for privatisation," he said.
With any sell-off likely to happen towards the end of 2014, this meant bringing in a replacement by the beginning of next year. So the hunt starts now.
RBS chairman Sir Philip Hampton anticipates no shortage of candidates. "This is a big interesting job and a big interesting bank," he said.
Undoubtedly this is true. But as Mr Hester prepares to go after five years in post, it is clear opportunities have been lost, in particular on the issue of executive pay.
This is illustrated by Sir Philip's comments that Mr Hester's pay-off of a year's salary of £1.6m from the date he departs and up to £4.2m –money taxpayers could consider their own – in share awards "could not be more bog standard".
RBS, Sir Philip insists, will also pay "commercial" rates, a clear signal that a salary and benefits package that at least matches Mr Hester's own is available to his successor.
Likewise, the banking system looks much as it did before. A few institutions dominate, newcomers struggle to make headway and small companies complain loans are hard to come by.
Much of this is at least as much a political failure than an RBS failure. It seems politics is driving this latest stage in the bank's history.
Mr Hester's exit is a signal reprivatisation of RBS is the goal below which all other objectives must be subsumed.
It seems clear that by the 2015 General Election, RBS must be back under the control of the institutional investors who did so little to prevent the errors that led to its near collapse. It is hoped the stability of an institution RBS staff have worked so hard to rebuild is not put in jeopardy in the interests of some pre-election preening by its current political masters.
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