Banking at ABN Amro Holding NV was the only careerHuibert Boumeester ever knew.
When the largest Dutch lender became the target of the biggest financial takeover in history in 2007, he pushed for Barclays Plc. A group led by the Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc won. Twenty months later, the former chief financial officer was found dead from gunshot wounds in woods 25 miles (40 kilometers) west of his London home.
While Boumeester loved Amsterdam-based ABN Amro, it was not the bank’s unraveling that killed him, colleagues said. An inquest opened and adjourned today at the coroner’s office in Reading, southern England. Boumeester suffered shotgun wounds to his head, Peter Bedford, the coroner, said by telephone. “Police are not treating the death as suspicious,” the U.K.’s Thames Valley Police department said in a statement on July 3.
“Business came first,” said Machiel Jansen Schoonhoven, Boumeester’s best man at his wedding in 1991 and a former ABN Amro colleague. “It was not the outcome to the takeover that he had wanted, but he took it as part of an outcome of a free market.”
Boumeester, 49, joined ABN Amro in 1987 and helped build it into one of the world’s biggest banks. If London-based Barclays had won, he would have been the only ABN Amro manager to become an executive director of the combined bank. Edinburgh-based RBS, together with partners Banco Santander SA of Spain and Fortis of Belgium and the Netherlands, broke ABN Amro into pieces.
‘Vulnerable’ Man
“What happened at ABN Amro and after the takeover may have played a role, but in no way would I conclude that it was the cause,” Rijkman Groenink, ABN Amro’s former chief executive officer, said in an interview. “There was nothing he should have felt responsible for at ABN Amro that would have forced him to take his life.”
While the cause of Boumeester’s death hasn’t been confirmed, police described him as a “vulnerable” man who had been “feeling down.”
Boumeester, who lived in London’s Belgravia district, was married and had three children.
“The family didn’t want to comment at this time as they stress the need for peace and privacy to deal with their loss,” Sandra Maas, a spokeswoman, said.
Suicides have shocked global investors in the last 12 months. German billionaire Adolf Merckle stepped in front of a train in January. David Kellerman, chief financial officer of Freddie Mac in McLean, Virginia, hanged himself in April. U.K. investor Kirk Stephenson jumped in front of a train last September.
Many Go Untreated
“Eighty to 90 percent of people who die by suicide have a retrospectively diagnosed mental-health condition, but only about half of those had actually sought treatment,” said Lanny Berman, executive director of the American Association of Suicidology in Washington.
ABN Amro traces its roots to 1824, when the Dutch King Willem I founded a company to foster trade with colonies. The bank offered Boumeester a chance to see the world and test himself.
“The bank was very, very important to him -- a major part of his life,” said former ABN Amro vice chairman Wilco Jiskoot. “If you would put it on a scale, you would almost put it on the extreme end.”
Boumeester’s mother is a scion of the Fentener van Vlissingen family that owns the Netherlands’ SHV Holdings NV. The company had 11.3 billion euros ($15.8 billion) in sales in 2008 from gas and transport units, a retail goods wholesaler and private equity investments. Boumeester, who studied law atLeiden University in the Netherlands, went into the military and spent several months in the U.S. learning about venture capital before joining ABN Amro, Jansen Schoonhoven said.
Banker Loved Nature
Throughout his life, the Dutch banker would escape into nature, friends said. He hunted as a boy and as a man he shot game on an estate he managed in Scotland. In Africa, Boumeester helped run a network of wildlife parks co-founded by a billionaire uncle.
“He grew up in the countryside, and he was a really enthusiastic hunter so he spent a lot of his time in nature,” Jansen Schoonhoven said.
In Malaysia, where Boumeester served as ABN Amro’s country manager, bankers looked up to the Dutchman as “a coach, mentor, boss, a top-class professional,” Jansen Schoonhoven said.
Boumeester raised his concern about RBS’s group breaking up ABN Amro in a July 2007 interview with Bloomberg Television. “There is the issue of breaking up the bank, which is not the same as integrating it,” he said.
Resigned Last Year
Boumeester resigned from ABN Amro in March 2008 after it was acquired. Jiskoot said he’d talked to Boumeester about the outcome of the takeover battle.
“He was one of the ones who was pretty realistic,” Jiskoot said. “Maybe because he was an incredibly hard-working, pretty decisive type of person, maybe he missed at stages a more emotional discussion about things.”
ABN Amro paid Boumeester a base salary of 114,000 euros in 2008, plus a 3.8 million-euro termination fee, according the bank’s annual report. In 2007, Boumeester received a 667,000- euro salary, a 1 million-euro bonus and 4.82 million euros in share-based payments.
Boumeester resigned earlier this year from the board of Artemis Asset Management Ltd., a former ABN Amro unit that is now owned by Paris-basedBNP Paribas SA.
Hunting Estate
In 2008, Boumeester started renting a hunting estate in Perthshire, Scotland. The estate is 16 miles from the home of former RBS chairman George Mathewson.
On Boumeester’s Scottish estate, two keepers quit in January as the shooting season ended because it wasn’t clear whether they would work another season, said Joe Guest, agent for the estate.
“He had depression,” said Jiskoot. “He wouldn’t return phone calls. He turned off his mobile. He would not answer. It was a deliberate attempt to separate.”
Boumeester’s best man remains in shock. “Everyone keeps some stuff for themselves,” Jansen Schoonhoven said.
