Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg NewsAntónio Horta-Osório, chief executive of Lloyds Banking Group.
9:36 a.m. | Updated LONDON — The Lloyds Banking Group, partly owned by the British government, said on Wednesday that its chief executive would take a leave of absence for several weeks because of exhaustion.
António Horta-Osório, 47, who took over as chief of Lloyds in March, consulted physicians after experiencing “extreme fatigue,” a spokeswoman said.
Mr. Horta-Osório, a Portuguese national who ran the British operations of Banco Santander of Spain before joining Lloyds, is expected to return to his post before the end of the year, the bank said. Tim Tookey, the departing chief financial officer, is taking over as interim chief executive until Mr. Horta-Osório returns, Lloyds said.
“He inherited a very difficult situation and clearly had put everything into it,” Bruce Packard, an analyst at Seymour Pierce, said.“He has taken on quite a lot, and there were quite high expectations which maybe weren’t helpful either.”
Mr. Horta-Osório joined Lloyds with great support from investors, many hoping that the new chief executive would help turn around the struggling bank and wean it off government support. The Lloyds board lured Mr. Horta-Osório from Santander, where he had a good track record of increasing the bank’s presence in Britain, expanding market share and increasing earnings.
Within four months of taking over, Mr. Horta-Osório had toured the country to visit Lloyds branches, talk to employees from bank clerks to managers and announced a plan to achieve £1.5 billion ($2.4 billion) in annual savings by 2014. In June, he said the bank would eliminate 15,000 jobs, or 14 percent of its work force.
Mr. Horta-Osório had also reshuffled the bank’s top management, bringing in some former colleagues from Santander. Recently, he had been working on finding a buyer for about 600 bank branches before the end of the year. Lloyds is selling the branches as part of its merger with the mortgage lender HBOS.
His turnaround efforts have been made more difficult because economic growth in Britain has remained sluggish and financial markets have been turbulent.
Last month, Moody’s Investors Service cut the senior debt ratings of Lloyds and 11 other British lenders, including Santander’s British business. The ratings agency said the government would be less likely to bail out the banks if they ran into troubles.
Lloyds shares fell 5 percent around midday in London on Wednesday after the announcement of Mr. Horta-Osório’s leave.
The Lloyds board met on Wednesday morning to discuss the situation, agreeing that Mr. Tookey would take over as interim chief executive until Mr. Horta-Osório’s return.
Mr. Tookey had been expected to leave Lloyds early next year, having handed in his resignation this year to join Friends Life, another British financial services company.
Lloyds, which has about 30 million customers, is due to report its third-quarter results on Tuesday. In August, the bank reported pretax profit of £1.1 billion in the first half of the year, down 31 percent from £1.6 billion in the period a year earlier. Mr. Horta-Osório said then that the bank was “well positioned” because of the “series of rapid, focused actions we have taken since March.”
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