Credit Suisse Group AG’s longtime top shareholder Harris Associates slashed its stake by about half, in a sign of wavering confidence on the latest turnaround plan of the troubled Swiss lender.
The U.S. investment firm, which last year still held a stake of about 10 percent, saw its holding fall to about 5 percent as of the end of last year, according to a filing. David Herro, Harris’s chief investment officer for international equities, said that while the investment firm did participate in Credit Suisse’s 4 billion-franc ($4.3 billion) capital increase late last year, its overall stake fell.
“Net new capital was added which automatically shrinks our holding,” he wrote by email, adding that Harris’s stake was just under 5 percent. “Additionally, with withdrawals, year-end distributions etc., we had to raise liquidity.”
Harris has owned Credit Suisse stock since the early years of this century and decided to double down on its bet after the 2008 financial crisis. While Herro defended the bank when its troubles started, he grew more critical of its board of directors as the lender struggled to fix its investment bank and move past losses and scandals.
Last year’s capital increase, designed to fund job cuts and a spinout of large parts of the investment bank, diluted many of the shareholders who declined to participate. In total, Credit Suisse issued 1.35 billion new shares, an increase of more than half compared with the 2.65 billion common shares it had outstanding at the end of September.
