BOV chairman John Cassar White to resign, Deo Scerri mooted for role

Bank of Valletta chairman John Cassar White will see his term of office come to an end, after filing an official letter of resignation, MaltaToday has been told.

Cassar White was appointed chairman of BOV, whose largest institutional shareholder is the Maltese government, in April 2013.

Banking sources have suggested that the government will nominate Deo Scerri for the chairmanship, having been appointed to the board of directors in April 2013.

A qualified accountant, Scerri was the managing partner of RSM Malta, before stepping down from the role to take up the BOV directorship. His firm was the auditor for the Labour Party, as well as having served as the auditor for the Sadeen group’s educational subsidiary in Malta, the developers of the controversial American University of Malta.

The BOV chairmanship, whose appointment rests squarely in the government’s hands, has long been considered a post where political influence comes first.

Cassar White has in the past addressed a political rally for the Labour Party after it was elected to power, and before that was one of Labour leader Alfred Sant’s confidants, as well as a former chairman of the Malta Shipyards during the Sant administration.

On his watch, BOV was strongly criticised by the Maltese courts for allowing the company’s directors to assess each other’s suitability to contest the board of directors election, rather than by an independent committee.

George Portanier – a BOV director since 1992 – filed the case after fellow directors deemed he was no longer suitable to contest the post, following a self-assessment exercise by the same board.

Deo Scerri

Instead of having a nomination committee independent from the board, John Cassar White had decided to draft a questionnaire so that directors could assess themselves and other candidates on their suitability to re-contest the posts.

The procedure enabled the directors themselves to decide who to exclude from contesting the elections for directorship, which meant directors could bar a serving director who did not get along with them. Minutes of a board meeting showed that Cassar White himself acknowledged that better procedures needed to be put in place. The bank changed its vetting system after the court decision.

As BOV chairman, Cassar White chairs the boards of MSV Life p.l.c., Valletta Fund Management and Valletta Fund Services, and is a member on the board of Mapfre Middlesea p.l.c. He spent most of his professional career with Bank of Valletta, from where he retired in 2008 after having occupied different senior executive positions over a career spanning 36 years. He also served as director of a number of state-owned companies as well as private investment companies. Up to March 2013, he was a lecturer at the Institute of Business and Commerce of MCAST.

Deo Scerri currently chairs the BOV board’s Audit Committee and is a member of the board’s Remuneration and Nominations Committee and a member of the bank’s Asset and Liability Committee. He is the financial expert on the local UEFA Clubs Licensing Board and is also a member of the Malta Football Association’s Finance Committee.