Julius Baer has proposed two long-standing bankers for election as new independent members of the board at the upcoming general meeting.
Julius Baer will ask investors to elect Kathryn Shih and Christian Meissner (pictured below) to its board at its shareholder meeting in April, the Swiss wealth manager said in a statement on Monday. The nomination of twin heavyweights comes after Paul Man Yiu Chow, ex-boss of Hong Kong's stock exchange, opted not to stand for reelection.
All other current members of the Board of Directors will stand for re-election. Meissner will immediately take up his mandate after the election, while Shih will take up her mandate on 1 September 2020.
A citizen of the U.K, Shih has nonetheless spent 32 years at UBS in Hong Kong. In her last position, she was President Asia Pacific and Member of the Group Executive Board at UBS, before she retired at the end of 2018. There, she headed Wealth Management Asia Pacific of the Swiss bank for 14 years. At present, Shih is a member of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Business School Advisory Board and Temasek Fellow of the Wealth Management Institute in Singapore.
Meissner, a 50-year-old Austrian, also has ties to UBS: he spoke to the Swiss bank last year about a top role, several sources familiar with the matter told finews.asia. Meissner has more than 30 years of experience in the banking industry, which mostly revolves around investment banking. He worked at Bank of America Merrill Lynch from July 2010 to February 2019, where he was most recently Head of Global Corporate and Investment Banking.
