Nomura CEO to quit over insider trading scandal

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/jul/26/nomura-ceo-quits-insider-trading-scandal

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Nomura, Japan's top investment bank, will appoint its securities unit head Koji Nagai as its new chief executive after Kenichi Watanabe quit to take responsibility for an insider trading scandal.

People with knowledge of the situation had earlier said the resignations of Watanabe and his top lieutenant, Takumi Shibata, were approved at a board meeting on Thursday morning.

The departure of the architects of Nomura's takeover of the Asian and European assets of Lehman Brothers raises questions about the future of the global expansion strategy they pursued.

Nagai, a three-decade company veteran, took over that unit in April as part of a management reshuffle.

Nomura's shakeup comes a month after the bank cut pay for both of its top executives in response to the third insider trading scandal since Watanabe, who joined the bank in 1975, took the helm four years ago.

"When you look at their history, the number of scandals, this was the last straw," said Jim Sinegal, an analyst with Morningstar research house.

At the start of a news briefing on the results, the CFO Junko Nakagawa apologised for the insider trading scandal and promised to bolster internal controls. She and three other executives bowed in apology.

"I can't say that there is no impact on our earnings," she said. "It is difficult at this stage to numerically estimate the possible damage. All we want to do is make efforts to regain trust."

The resignation of Watanabe, 59, had been expected by many inside Nomura since signs emerged that the bank's leadership was at loggerheads with Japan's financial regulators, which accused Nomura of being slow to respond to an investigation into insider trading practices that had grown rampant in the Tokyo market.

The turmoil comes as the industry globally finds itself under huge financial and regulatory pressure.

Investment banks have been hammered both by falling trading and advisory income as clients pull back from markets because of the eurozone debt crisis, and by political calls for a change in their culture after a string of scandals, most recently over the fixing of Libor.

Watanabe and Shibata, Nomura's chief operating officer, oversaw the troubled 2008 attempt to absorb assets of the failed US bank Lehman Brothers and a key question for their successors will be whether to follow their ambitious plans for worldwide expansion.

That strategy was dealt a blow earlier this year with the abrupt departure of Jasjit Bhattal, Lehman's former Asia Pacific CEO who helped broker the deal, and who had been seen as a possible successor to Watanabe.

Moody's Investors Service cut its debt rating on Nomura to one notch above speculative or "junk" grade in March, citing concerns about the long-term profitability of its overseas operations.

Nomura booked a pretax loss of ¥12.1bn (£99m) in the latest quarter overseas, but that was about half the loss in the previous quarter – suggesting the cost-cutting plan is starting to bear some fruit.

The scandal that brought down the bank's leaders dates back to 2010. Nomura has confirmed it was the source of leaks on planned share offerings by the energy firm Inpex, Mizuho Financial Group and Tokyo Electric Power.

In all three cases, employees in its institutional sales department provided the tipoffs.

A panel of attorneys brought in by Nomura to investigate the insider trading cases said it found equity sales staff would regularly pump colleagues for inside information about upcoming stock offerings and then share tips with investors.

Watanabe's decision to step down was welcomed by Tsutomu Okubo, the lead director of a ruling Democratic party of Japan committee that has been crafting stronger insider trading rules.

"I applaud Watanabe's resignation from the perspective that it is aimed at leading to a reform of the securities industry," Okubo told reporters.

Nomura, Japan's largest brokerage, is awaiting possible sanctions from Japan's Financial Services Agency but the scandal has already cost it clients.

Some asset managers have stopped trading with the firm to meet their own compliance rules and it has lost underwriting business, including being left off the government's sale of $6bn worth of Japan Tobacco shares.

Shares of Nomura have fallen in value by more than a third since the first insider trading case emerged in March.

Scandals have forced Nomura to change executive leadership twice since the collapse of Japan's asset bubble. In 1991, the then president Yoshihisa Tabuchi resigned after the brokerage admitted to compensating favoured clients for stock losses.

In 1997, Hideo Sakamaki stepped down as president after the bank was found to have channelled more than $3m to a gangster in order to keep him from raising trouble at its 1995 shareholder meeting.