CITY AND SUBURBAN
All change as Maarten comes out of his Shell and Lloyds decides to go Dutch
CHRISTOPHER FILDES
Ido hope that Lloyds Bank has not got Dutch Elm Disease. There is a lot of it about, and now Sir Brian Pitman, Lloyds' formidable chairman, is preparing to make way for Maarten Van den Bergh. Maarten who? Oh, come on, you remember, he used to be president of Royal Dutch Shell and vice-president of the committee of manag- ing directors of the Royal Dutch/Shell Group, two-fifths British, three-fifths Dutch, and known as Shell for short. This means that he did not get quite to the top of one of the world's largest and most solid- ly entrenched commercial bureaucracies. Few other groups can have built manage- ment by committee into their system of government. For the last two years, so Lloyds tells us, he has been deeply involved in transforming Shell into the 'Group of the Future'. This must have required him to notice that Shell had too many head offices: one in Rotterdam and two in London, on opposite banks of the Thames. The one on the north bank looks like an Art Deco clock, but he and his colleagues somehow steeled themselves to do without it. At Lloyds, Sir Brian has been economising on head offices for years. When he took con- trol of the Trustee Savings Bank, it had a registered office in Glasgow, a head office in Birmingham, a London office in Lom- bard Street, just down the road from Sir Brian's, and another office for Hill Samuel, which it owned. All but the brass plate in Glasgow are gone. Being the low-cost pro- ducer in his chosen markets has brought spectacular results in good times for the banks, and will be Lloyds' strongest card when bad times follow.
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