In late 2013, tensions among senior management at Portugal’s Banco Espírito Santo (BES) were running high. At a board meeting in Lisbon, the chief executive of BES’s investment bank (BESI), José Maria Ricciardi, wanted to give a vote of no confidence to his cousin and BES president Ricardo Silva Salgado, believing BES’s turmoil at the time to be Mr Salgado’s doing.
“As a member of a board of a bank, when you are confronted with activity that can be criminal or non-ethical, you must combat that, you must put yourself against it, you must denounce it – even if you had nothing to do with it,” says Mr Ricciardi. “At the time it was hard because I was alone. People thought [wanting to vote against Mr Salgado] was awful of me – and when you have family mixed in it is even more difficult. But before belonging to a family, I had a duty to the regulators, the market and other stakeholders.”