Citi's largest shareholder, Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, said on CNBC Monday that he would like to see Sanford Weill return to Citigroup on a temporary basis to help stabilize the situation....Does the prince stand to win or lose with all the financial instability of Citigroup? And is Sandy Weill the right man for stabilizing Citigroup?
Excerpt from this article in the November 7, 2007 Washington Post:
Poor Chuck Prince. For the past five years, he thought his job was to clean up the ethical mess at Citigroup left by his longtime friend and patron Sandy Weill.
As Weill was taking his leave of the financial behemoth he had created, state and federal officials were moving to put the company into the equivalent of regulatory receivership. And the company was facing years of civil litigation by shareholders of Enron, WorldCom and who knows how many other bankrupt companies that claimed to have been misled by Citigroup analysts or investment bankers. As the directors pondered their choice, who better than Prince, a sober and trusted lawyer, to negotiate the settlements and make sure it would never happen again?
And what a mess it turned out to be! The subprime lending unit in Dallas that was cited for all manner of unsavory business practices. The bank's role in advising and financing Enron. The supposedly independent equity analysts who blew air into the tech and telecom bubble to curry favor with top management and help generate fees for the investment bankers. The private bank in Japan that misled customers about the risks of investments while helping other customers manipulate stock prices and hide trading losses.
As he moved from one scandal to another, Prince was forced to clean house, firing old friends and trusted allies who either knew, or should have known, about the misdeeds. To satisfy regulators and the demands of the new Sarbanes-Oxley law, he installed internal controls to make sure it didn't happen again. Employees were treated to a regular diet of ethics training.
What Prince never quite realized, however, was that Citigroup's problem wasn't that its people didn't know right from wrong....
so he wants to put the weasel in charge of the henhouse?
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somebody has it in for u.s.
then, we have this from none other than george soros.
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