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Bling it on

Let me start by laying my cards firmly on the table. What follows is pure conjecture. Before you malign the entire journalism profession as being like that anyway, please allow me to qualify that statement. You do have to be enthralled by the recent announcement by luxury goods group Richemont that it’s nominated economist and former senior public servant Maria Ramos to its board. Ramos happens to be the current CEO at Absa.

Ramos, the former director-general at the National Treasury who later ran Transnet, has been boss at Absa for just on two years and is the only CEO of a South African Big Four bank (as far as I can recall) with an external board appointment on a listed company.

Stephen Koseff, CEO of SA’s fifth biggest bank, has a seat on the Bidvest board, but it’s a practice the Registrar of Banks probably tolerates more than actively supports. For example, newly appointed Standard Bank chairman Fred Phaswana gave up several of his external commitments to take on that job; and when Tom Boardman took over Nedbank and was offered predecessor Richard Laubscher’s seat on the Old Mutual plc board he declined in favour of focusing his energies on the task at hand. One of the reasons put forward by Standard Bank for former chairman Derek Cooper’s generous golden handshake was that the job was practically full time and precluded him from earning significant income as a director elsewhere.

Ramos’s appointment while heading a Big Four bank is distinctly unusual and invites further scrutiny. Her peers are battening down the hatches and focusing their energies on sourcing hard to come by revenues, concentrating on cost containment and looking at the state of their clients’ balance sheets with some trepidation as higher interest rates look certain to become a negative factor again before the year is out.

Ramos is building a fascinating international profile.

When Barclays plc took over Absa five years ago it was chairman Danie Cronjé who got a seat at the Barclays top table. Steve Booysen wasn’t offered the privilege, and Ramos – who gazumped Booysen before his five-year term as CEO of the banking group was up – sits on the controlling shareholders’ executive committee, representing not only Absa but also gaining insights to all Barclays’ global operations. Now she’s been invited to join the board of one of the world’s foremost luxury goods groups – admittedly, it has South African roots but its influence and brands are distinctly global.

She’s served as a non-executive director on other boards. Ramos gave up a seat on the boards of Remgro and SABMiller shortly before assuming the Absa CEO job and she’d previously served a four-year term on Sanlam’s board. Ramos has worked with the Ruperts before on Remgro and they clearly value her insights. It doesn’t hurt that she’s regularly appeared on the list of Fortune Magazine’s most powerful women in the world.

Ramos, of course, is one half of SA’s most powerful couple: call Maria Ramos and Trevor Manuel the financial world’s Posh and Becks if you must, but that would be underselling their considerable combined brain power and global marketability.

When the Jacob Zuma administration took office Manuel was moved from finance to Planning Minister in the Office of the President – publicly a sideways promotion of a sort, as the new Government introduced new economic clusters, allowing for a broader church of views to be incorporated into how SA’s finances would be run.

Manuel is far more low-key nowadays than he was previously. He seldom speaks out on issues of public interest – recent exceptions being his comments to allay hysteria about the threat of acid mine drainage and the Jimmy Manyi racism saga.

But Manuel’s low profile has led to widespread speculation that he’s biding his time to do something else. When he became the longest-serving Treasury boss in the world it was speculated he might join an organisation such as the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank. His marriage to Ramos and her appointment to Absa put paid to those rumours for a while.

However, Ramos is now getting greater international exposure (please refer back to my opening remark at this point about pure conjecture) through Barclays plc and now through Richemont. That, coupled with her track record at Transnet (no pun intended) and Treasury, Sanlam and SABMiller and it adds to an already impressive CV.

Ramos has never been backward in coming forward. As a junior employee in the then Barclays SA she challenged the men-only policy on bank scholarships, lobbied for the grand prize and won in 1983 – getting the company to fund her further education. In retrospect, a good investment by Barclays plc that secured her services as CEO of their SA subsidiary in 2008. Now back in the Barclays fold, Ramos is again spreading her wings. To what end?
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