A former minister at the time of the 2008 banking crisis, Baroness Vadera, has been named as the new chair of the UK arm of the Spanish bank Santander.
She will become one of the most senior women at the top of a UK banking operation and the first to chair a bank. She replaces Lord Burns, who announced his intention to leave nine months ago.
Born in Uganda, her family moved to India and then England, where she studied PPE at Oxford.
Vadera, who will be paid £625,000 a year, was an investment banker at UBS until 1999 when she joined the government, becoming a peer in 2007 and a trusted advisor to Gordon Brown. She became known as “Gordon’s representative on earth” and played a key role in the 2008 bank bailouts as well as the nationalisation of Railtrack in 2001.
She is joining Santander’s UK arm at a time when it is undergoing management change. Ana Botín has returned to Spain to run the overall bank after the death of her father and has been replaced as chief executive in the UK by newly recruited Nathan Bostock.
Botín, said to be a personal friend of Vadera’s, said: “I know she is committed to building on our record as a scale challenger in British banking, and to our work to help people and businesses prosper”.
Burns, a former Treasury mandarin, has been chairman of Abbey National since 2002 and led the sale of the business to Santander two years later. The operation expanded rapidly during the crisis, buying Alliance & Leicester and the savings books of Bradford & Bingley when the mortgage operation was nationalised.
The UK business is eventually expected to be floated on the London stock exchange, an idea first mooted in 2010 but subject to delay by ongoing regulatory change.
Vadera, who resigned from government in 2009, said she was passionate about supporting small businesses and households. She will retain her non-executive roles on the boards of miner BHP Billiton and AstraZeneca, the pharmaceuticals company which fended off a takeover from Pfizer earlier this year. She will end her consultancy advisory roles which have included working for the Dubai government.
