This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

Spain’s Santander has accused one of Europe’s highest-profile banker of “dubious ethical and moral behaviour” after he sued the bank for €100m (£90m) when it withdrew an offer to make him chief executive.

The bank accused Andrea Orcel of making secret recordings during the dispute.

The 56-year-old Italian had been offered the top job at Santander last year and had already quit his post as head of UBS’s investment bank when the bank changed its mind in January, saying it could not meet his pay demands.

Orcel has alleged that a four-page letter written in September, in which Santander offered him the job along with bonuses to compensate for the deferred pay he risked losing by quitting the Swiss bank UBS, is legally binding.

But Santander said in a statement on Friday that the letter to Orcel was not a contract as required by Spanish law. “A contract was never completed or fulfilled,” it said.

Santander said it had learned through Orcel’s lawsuit that in January he started to record private conversations without other parties’ knowledge or consent.

“This is a practice of dubious ethical and moral behaviour for someone who was potentially to become Santander’s CEO and has ultimately confirmed that the board of directors’ decision not to proceed with his appointment was right.”

Orcel is understood to have begun recording phone conversations after taking legal advice that it was legal to do so under Spanish law.

A spokesman said Orcel regretted the bank’s “decision to again bring this matter before public scrutiny, after the very public announcement of his hiring, dismissal and remuneration details, with the material personal and professional damage that follows”.

He added: “Mr Orcel will not comment on this or any other BS [Banco Santander] statement, in line with his understanding that this is a legal matter that shall be dealt with on strict legal terms and based on existing evidence by the competent court.”

The lawsuit is expected to be handled by Madrid’s court juzgado de primera instancia and could take more than 18 months to reach a verdict.

Santander defended its decision to change its mind about Orcel by saying it could not justify paying him a €50m signing-on fee.

The award was intended to compensate him for bonuses he would forfeit by leaving his job as president of the investment bank at UBS.

At the time, Santander said it had been caught off guard by his compensation demands, which were for “a sum significantly above the board’s original expectations at the time of the appointment”.

As well as concerns over pay, Orcel also reportedly clashed several times with Santander’s executive chair, Ana Botín, who along with her father built the bank into the eurozone’s largest by stock market value.

The circumstances of Orcel’s claim against his once prospective employer are rare, in that the dispute came about before he had even taken up the position.

But multimillion-pound legal tussles between companies and the people chosen to lead them are not unknown in the corporate world.

The former AA chairman Bob Mackenzie launched a £225m claim against the roadside assistance firm after he was sacked after a “sustained and violent assault” on a colleague at a five-star hotel.

This year Michael Woodford, a former boss of Japanese camera firm Olympus, won a claim brought against him by one of its subsidiaries, which sought to revoke his £64m pension pot.

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Woodford had earlier blown the whistle on a $1.7bn (£1.4bn) accounting scandal at the company.

The logistics firm Stobart and its former boss Andrew Tinkler sued one another after he left following a dispute with the board over strategy. Tinkler lost an appeal this month after claiming for alleged breach of contract.

In 2017, the engineering group Dyson said it planned to sue the former chief executive Max Conze, alleging he had misused company resources and leaked secrets. Conze responded with a countersuit of his own but the two sides eventually settled their dispute.