LONDON - Barclays said Tuesday that Hector W. Sants, the bank’s compliance chief and a former head of Britain’s financial regulator, will take a leave of absence after suffering from exhaustion and stress.
Mr. Sants, who joined Barclays in January to help repair the bank’s image after a rate-rigging scandal, plans to return to his job at the end of the year. Mr. Sants’s responsibilities will be split among colleagues during his absence.
Before joining Barclays, Mr. Sants was chief executive of the Financial Services Authority, Britain’s main financial regulator, for five years. Under his leadership, the regulator came under increasing criticism because of the failure of the British mortgage lender Northern Rock in 2008. Mr. Sants acknowledged that mistakes were made leading up to the financial crisis.
During the financial crisis, Mr. Sants, a former Credit Suisse banker, was also part of the talks with Barclays that prevented it from buying some European assets from the collapsing Lehman Brothers.
Mr. Sants said in 2010 that he would retire from the financial regulator, but the government announced a few months later that he would stay on to help with a far-reaching change of the British regulatory system.
At Barclays, Mr. Sants started to review the bank’s risk-taking activities and helped chief executive Antony P. Jenkins tighten compliance after a fine of more than $450 million by regulators last year for its role in the manipulation of the benchmark interest rate known as Libor.
Mr. Sants is not the only senior executive in London’s financial industry to take a leave because of stress. António Horta-Osório, the chief executive of the Lloyds Banking Group, returned to the bank in January last year after taking a two-month medical leave for exhaustion at the end of 2011.
