“When I got here, the bank was a time bomb,” says António Horta-Osório, chief executive of Lloyds Banking Group. “We had £700 billion of banking assets and £300 billion of wholesale funding, half of which was short-term with an average tenor of two months.” He pauses and reflects. “The bank was in danger of going bankrupt.”
Aside from all the challenges of cleaning out a toxic loan book, Lloyds was faced with the height of the eurozone crisis, which meant there was a real risk of the short-term money markets closing.
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That was in January 2011, when Horta-Osório joined Lloyds as its chief executive.
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