António Horta-Osório: the tennis ace who saved Lloyds Bank

António Horta-Osório was determined to rescue Britain’s largest high-street bank from disaster, and he succeeded, if at the cost of his own health. Can he repeat the trick at stricken Credit Suisse?

António Horta-Osório
(Image credit: © Luke MacGregor/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Asked to identify the high point of his career to date, António Horta-Osório pinpoints an afternoon in May 2017 when he got a call from a Treasury official saying: “António, we’ve sold the final shares”. After eight long years, Lloyds Bank was finally fully re-privatised. He called a staff conference and said: “‘We did it. We gave the taxpayers’ money back. And it’s a great tribute to you’. We made a toast. It was a really good moment.”

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Jane writes profiles for MoneyWeek and is city editor of The Week. A former British Society of Magazine Editors editor of the year, she cut her teeth in journalism editing The Daily Telegraph’s Letters page and writing gossip for the London Evening Standard – while contributing to a kaleidoscopic range of business magazines including Personnel Today, Edge, Microscope, Computing, PC Business World, and Business & Finance.

She has edited corporate publications for accountants BDO, business psychologists YSC Consulting, and the law firm Stephenson Harwood – also enjoying a stint as a researcher for the due diligence department of a global risk advisory firm.

Her sole book to date, Stay or Go? (2016), rehearsed the arguments on both sides of the EU referendum.

She lives in north London, has a degree in modern history from Trinity College, Oxford, and is currently learning to play the drums.