Posted on 08/15/2002 4:41:12 PM PDT by GeneD
Filed at 7:17 p.m. ET
NEW YORK (AP) -- Jack Grubman quit Thursday as telecommunications analyst for Salomon Smith Barney amid growing controversy over his alleged conflicts of interest in touting the shares of WorldCom, Global Crossing and other fallen companies.
In announcing the departure to employees, the company defended the powerful, money-making analyst's work and integrity, but made no mention of the embarrassing investigations into his dual role as stock picker and dealmaker now being conducted the government and securities industry.
``Jack and I agree that recent events have made it difficult for him, both personally and professionally, to stay in a job and industry that we know are important to him,'' Michael A. Carpenter, the chief executive for the company, a subsidiary of Citigroup, wrote in a letter to employees.
Grubman, whose research reports once sent stock soaring, is now under fire for his unwavering recommendations for companies that were also paying millions of dollars to his firm for investment banking services.
The most notable of those companies were WorldCom and Global Crossing, which he remained bullish almost up until the time that those companies landed in bankruptcy, scandalized by disclosures of deceptive accounting.
``Although he, along with many other experts in the industry, did not anticipate the collapse of the telecommunications sector, we believe that, as he notes in the letter he sent to me, he always wrote what he believed and conducted himself professionally and in accordance with legal and ethical standards,'' Carpenter wrote.
Grubman has been targeted by at least 40 consumer complaints and lawsuits, many of them related to the WorldCom collapse.
Testifying before the House Financial Services Committee last month, said he had no idea that WorldCom executives hid billions in expenses from investors.
Ping! I'm surprised he held out this long.
Winnick is suing Global Crossing for $500,000 in back rent.He and his cronies had another company which was leasing space to and arraigning loans for GS.
But there is an almost a complete short and mid term lack of respect for individual performance, and the pacing of work in such an environment is either glacial or fire drill. Professional development is spotty, unfocused -- the steady workflow, service and product improvements that occur in genuine private business is absent, extremely diluted.
Without the expectation of external accountability to some necessary sustaining profit, or to some boss or customer who will can you, the workplace, the workforce becomes mush. Polite mush, but mush. Like life without teeth. Without spines. Without the male effect viagra can be used to bring on.
So not only is the ability to fire, to hold to genuine economic account, important to the trust for public's money. It is also needed to free the federal civil servants from the polite dullard status of slavery they have got themselves into.
I think Mr. Bush knows that and has magnificently attempted to return such accountability to that proposed new Homeland Security Department. Believe me, it is needed.
I know how hard it is to be without a revenue stream -- a job, etc. There is a comfort in that exchange of a string of binary digits from my employer's bank's computers to mine own bank's computers that a paycheck now has become. Yet it is a bitter comfort.
Good. Since pension money is kept separate from company funds, it's still safe, and he'll still receive it, so there will be money from which to collect all the judgements against him.
Lifetime use of the company jet too.
Won't do him much good, as the company isn't likely to have a jet much longer. And besides, bankruptcy courts can, and routinely do, nullify such contracts.
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