Hector Sants’s strong credibility in the City is understandable. For every year he has been a regulator there has been almost a decade when he was an investment banker.
His chairman, Sir Callum McCarthy, was at pains to emphasise yesterday that Mr Sants was “no soft touch” but many in the City regard him as one of their own. He is the gamekeeper who was a poacher for years and understands how markets work, how traders and dealmakers think and how excessive compliance can suffocate capitalism.
After Clifton and Corpus Christi, Oxford, where he studied psychology and philosophy, he began his City career at Philips & Drew, one of the biggest stockbroking houses. A star equity analyst in London covering food manufacturing companies, he quickly rose and at the age of 30 he was sent to New York to head the Wall Street operation.
He prospered when P&D was taken over by Union Bank of Switzerland, becoming global head of equities. In 1998 he joined Donaldson Lufkin & Jenrette. When Credit Suisse First Boston bought DLJ in 2000 he soon became chief executive of CSFB’s European operation.
He has been close to controversy, but never too close. When P&D got into trouble in the Blue Arrow scandal for concealing shares it could not sell, Mr Sants was parachuted in to clear up the mess. His role in the Terry Smith affair has never been clear. Mr Sants was Mr Smith’s boss at P&D when it emerged that the latter was writing a book criticising the accounting methods of UBS clients. According to one version of events, Mr Sants was dispatched to the publishers to try to suppress the book. He insists that he was not involved in Mr Smith’s sacking: “I was on holiday at the time he went.”
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Aged 51 and married with three children, he lives in Oxford and paints and shoots in his spare time.