Why Did Financial Services Authority Boss Hector Sants Quit?

Hector Sants has had enough. Last month the chief executive of the U.K.’s Financial Services Authority shocked the government — and the banking industry — by announcing his resignation. His decision was as abrupt as it was unexpected. Although Sants, 56, had tried to quit his post once before, in February 2010, Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne persuaded him to stay and help Prime Minister David Cameron’s new coalition government overhaul the British regulatory system in the wake of the financial crisis. That process has yet to reach completion. Sants’ sudden exit casts a shadow of uncertainty over that effort, which will effectively break the FSA into two separate-but-equal regulatory agencies come 2013. The Prudential Regulation Authority, organized under the aegis of the Bank of England, will supervise systemically important institutions, including banks and insurance companies; the Financial Conduct Authority, a stand-alone regulatory agency, will be charged with maintaining the integrity of the U.K.’s capital markets, overseeing financial services firms and protecting consumers. If Sants had stayed, he would have been made the first chief executive of the PRA and named as one of three deputy governors of the central bank. Unexpected as Sants’ decision was, his former colleagues knew what the financial crisis had already cost him. Sants worked “extraordinarily hard through a harrowing period,” says Gregory Brandman, a former manager in the FSA’s enforcement and financial crime division who decamped in October of last year to join law firm Eversheds as a partner. “It wasn’t an enormous surprise that he decided he didn’t need the aggravation any longer.” Sants’ departure may have been hastened by the political heat he’d begun to take from Parliament’s Treasury Committee, which summoned him in January to discuss the FSA’s report on the failure of Royal Bank of Scotland Group. He was also expecting to be summoned back by the committee for a potentially bruising preappointment hearing this spring, in anticipation of his elevation to CEO. Andrew Bailey, Sants’ deputy at the FSA’s prudential business unit, will temporarily assume his former boss’s role once Sants leaves at the end of June; Martin Wheatley, former CEO of Hong Kong’s Securities and Futures Commission and onetime deputy CEO of the London Stock Exchange Group, will remain head of the conduct business unit and ultimately take on the role of chief executive of the FCA. Although the FSA’s formal split has yet to be implemented, the pending division is already having a powerful distracting effect on the regulator’s staff members, who have worked feverishly to ramp up their oversight of London’s leading institutions and are now faced with either being absorbed into the Bank of England’s new subsidiary, the PRA, or getting left behind. “There is real concern within the FSA that all of the best supervisors are effectively being pinched by the Bank of England for the PRA, where they’re going to get plummy, high-profile jobs supervising systemically important institutions,” says Brandman. “There’s clearly a heavy bleed of talent to the bank. What is going to happen to the quality of conduct supervision if all of the best supervisors are on the prudential side?”

问题无法轻易回答。Margaret Cole，FSA的可爱且有效地有效的金融犯罪部门前任，在2月份辞职，在FCA的顶级工作之后。在她在FSA的七年期间，科尔负责帮助监管机构为内幕交易赢得其首次刑事定罪 - 没有卑鄙的壮举。3月20日，PricewaterhouseCoopers宣布COLE将加入其伦敦司，普华永道英国，作为其总法律顾问，将成为其秋季执行委员会的成员。如果最有经验的监督员 - 理解业务的复杂性 - 留下FSA或重新部署，金融服务业可能会暗示开展监管如何在未来几个月内处理Sants没有详细阐述他的计划，但他似乎很可能在私营部门的高级工作结束，在加入FSA之前，他在瑞银和信贷瑞士职业生涯中度过了近30年。作为一个监管机构，他似乎从未享有敏捷，虽然很少有人会质疑他作为公务员的奉献精神。但是对公共奇观的厌恶令人厌恶使他现在决定离开，在党政政治开始上色预约过程之前，更容易理解。