Banco Montepio elects new CEO

A leadership battle for one of Portugal’s oldest banks has finally be settled with the appointment of a new CEO.

Pedro Alves, the current president of Montepio Credit is chosen candidate to lead the mutual bank Associação Mutualista Montepio Geral (AMMG) known simply as Montepio.
Up until now the role has been fulfilled by an interim figure, Dulce Mota who is the vice-president of the group.
The bank has struggled to turn a profit over the past three years after being badly hit during the financial crisis while leadership squabbles saw the bank plunge into the red between 2013 and 2016 with debts reaching €300 million in 2016.
Pedro Alves’s name has already been sent to the Bank of Portugal and the “honesty and integrity” of the banker has already been checked and approved by the banking regulator.
Dulce Mota has run the bank since February as a purely interim measure to resolve the problem of Carlos Tavares having assumed the role of both CEO and chairman at the financial institution.
More recently, the Bank of Portugal pressured Montepio to clarify who was actually going to be running the bank which the bank said it would do by the end of this month after evaluating the appropriateness of its senior board members for the job.
Pedro Alves is a non-executive board member at Montepio and current President of Montepio Credit – a company within the Montepio group which focuses on specialised credit.
Montepio closed the first half of 2019 with modest profits of €3.6 million — down 77% on the same period in 2018 because of the poor performance of Finibanco Angola.