Nani Alfrida
The Jakarta Post
PT Bank Danamon’s president director Sebastian Paredes has officially proposed his resignation from the publicly listed bank’s top management post despite his success in significantly improving the bank’s performance.
Paredes said in Jakarta on Monday that he would stay with the bank until the shareholders meeting in April which would formally approve his resignation.
“This is my personal decision that I have to take. I will work on my personal challenges,” he told reporters on the sidelines of a press conference in Jakarta. He said that he agreed to continue working with the bank until the April shareholders meeting to give the board of management enough time to find a replacement.
Paredes said that his tenure as president director would normally end in April, 2011 but he denied that his decision to quit the bank a year earlier was due to any conflict with shareholders, as many people have surmised.
“Temasek remains the controlling shareholder of the bank, and they are very happy with the performance of the bank and the way that we manage the bank,” he said, adding that that his relations with the shareholders were quite good. Singapore Temasek’s subsidiary Asia Financial Ltd. controls a 67.7 percent stake in the bank with the remaining 32.3 percent held by the investing public.
Paredes acknowledged that he was the longest-running president director in the history of Danamon.
“The bank is now ready to step up to the next level, and Danamon has to find some one else to fill in the job,” he said diplomatically.
Paredes was born in 1961, graduating from California State University and he then gained an MBA from the Instituto de Empresa, Madrid, Spain. Before working for Danamon, he was managing director of Citigroup in South Africa.
Under Paredes’s leadership, Danamon has made many improvements despite the global financial crisis two years ago. The number of the bank’s depositors reached 5.2 million by the end of 2009 as compared to 2 million in 2005.
“The bank has made significant progress under Paredes’s leadership,” Danamon President Commissioner Ng Kee Choe said.
http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2010/01/26/danamon-boss-resigns-denies-internal-conflict.html