Will Jean-Paul Votron (sounds like a 70s popstar, doesn't he ?), CEO over at Fortis, soon be going the same way as Citi's Chuck Prince, Merrill Lynch's Stan O'Neal, UBS's Peter Wuffli and Wachovia's Ken Thompson, and be forced out of his firm ? Or, like Lehman's Dick Fuld, will he just remain under pressure, but stay at the helm like a wounded man ?

The smart money thinks that dear old Jean-Paul has had it. Fortis's board has convened a special meeting Friday to discuss shareholder concerns about the performance of the Belgian-Dutch financial services group. Shareholders are angry about Votron's plans to raise $13.1bn in cash via asset sales, a placement of new stock, a bond offering and canning this year's interim dividend following asset writedowns. As Bloomberg points out, Fortis has now lost over 50% of its market capitalization since last year, when it agreed to spend some $37.8bn to acquire parts of ABN AMRO in a deal with Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) and Santander.

RBS CEO Fred Goodwin is also facing similar pressure, although is thought to have been given 12 months to sort out his firm following writedowns and cost-pressures related to the ABN deal. The timing of the deal which led to the carve up of ABN could not have been worse for RBS and Fortis shareholders, coming as it did just as the market peaked ahead of the credit crisis. Cazenove said only this week that it estimates that ABN now represents around one third of RBS's balance sheet, yet will only add 1% by way of earnings-per-share by the end of 2010!

The much maligned Rijkman Groenik, the former CEO at ABN AMRO who was accused of doing nothing but restructure (unsuccessfully) his bank for years, has come out of all this quite well. ABN shareholders, who received most of their takeover bounty in cash, must go to bed each night and say a prayer for old Rijkman. And they won't even begrudge him his multi-million dollar exit package. Another man who must retire with a prayer each night is Barclays CEO John Varley, who surely gets on his knees and thanks the Lord he didn't 'win' the battle for ABN AMRO.

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