[Jay] Rasulo was asked if he’d rather have five minutes with Federal Reserve Board chairman Janet Yellen or a five-year-old kid who’d just gone to a Disney park for the first time. “That’s an easy one — way too easy,” he said. “I’ve had a million of those conversations with kids and they’re all great. And they’re always honest, which is the best thing.” [CFO]
Related Posts
Walgreens Is ‘Aware’ of CFO Being Charged with Second DUI in Just Over a Year
At this rate, Wade Miquelon is going to be at Billy Joel territory in no time:
Walgreen Co. Chief Financial Officer Wade Miquelon was arrested on suspicion of drunken driving last month, his second such arrest in a little more than a year, according to Kenilworth and Glencoe police.
Miquelon stonewalled officers when they requested a breathalyzer test which goes over well approximately 100% of the time. As for the past incident:
In Sept. 2009, he was stopped at 12:51 a.m. at Green Bay Road and Glencoe Drive and charged with speeding, improper lane usage, DUI and having alcohol in his system. In May, he accepted a one-year supervision for the latter offense, according to a Cook County District Court clerk.
“We’re aware of it,” said Walgreen’s spokesman Michael Polzin. “It’s a personal matter, and we don’t comment on personal matters.”
Are they also be aware that it’s relatively inexpensive to hire a full-time driver for a senior executive when you have profits of $2 billion? Just so, you know, no one gets killed.
Walgreens CFO charged for 2nd time with DUI [Chicago Breaking Business]
Sign of the Times: CFOs Living on Franks and Beans
Or ones that soon will be:
Look at the bright side, you were on the front page of the Post!
[via Gawker]
Ex-Bank of America CFO Is in Cuomo’s Crosshairs
This story is republished from CFOZone, where you’ll find news, analysis and professional networking tools for finance executives.
We briefly discussed work-inspired nightmares yesterday but as professiona robably don’t get a whole lot more unsettling than Joe L. Price’s.
Price, the former CFO at Bank of America, must be tossing and turning lately, what with the attorney general of New York naming him personally last week in a lawsuit over the bank’s handling of the ugly Merrill Lynch acquisition/investor-subsidized bailout/compensation party in late 2008.
Now, Price and former BofA CEO Ken Lewis face another unpleasant twist in what they must’ve thought originally was a slam dunk in an awkward but palatable settlement with the SEC over the Merrill Lynch deal (beware that slam-dunk feeling [see Tenet, George]).
Recall how Jed Rakoff, the irascible U.S. District Court judge presiding over the BofA/Merrill Lynch case, last year rejected a settlement between the SEC and BofA, saying that $33 million wasn’t nearly enough for the bank to make things right with investors who were kept in the dark about the unsavory downside – if that’s not too generous a word – for taking on Merrill Lynch’s baggage. And then on Monday Rakoff started asking mean questions about the second rendition, in which the SEC and BofA are saying, okay, fine, how does $150 million sound?
Going by some of the doubts Rakoff raised, he isn’t leaning toward letting the BofA executives ease on out of their difficult litigation-riddled winter into a springtime of sun-dappled redemption and new life. Easter, as it were, may yet be cold and wet (as may Passover, choose your festival). But don’t blame Rakoff because there are better scapegoats – the SEC, Andrew Cuomo, Punxatawny Phil …
Cuomo, that pesky AG in Albany, asserted in his allegations against Price et al. that BofA lawyers who had counseled against pulling the curtain aside on certain details about Merrill Lynch were essentially operating in the dark and that they were, therefore, misled. “Bank management failed to provide any of their lawyers with accurate information about the losses which the disclosure issue concerned,” the civil-suit complaint says, adding painful elaboration that alleges “false and incomplete information provided by Price.” (Ron Fink explains here).
This is not the kind of thing a CFO likes to read about himself or herself, which is why it may be best as a rule to come clean from the get-go. At the heart of the controversy is the assertion that BofA execs were simply not forthright about how they allowed Merrill Lynch brass to receive billions of dollars in bonus bucks in exchange for having lost billions of investor dollars.
In such a context, Radoff has implied, $33 million is chicken feed and $150 million is – I don’t know – cat food? The good judge apparently wants the bankers to throw some steak over the wall.
Also at issue, and fundamental to how BofA is managed going forward, are questions about how certain aspects of corporate governance are handled, perhaps especially about how compensation is set. Rakoff suggested that there might be better ways to come up with a reasonable pay scheme than leaving it to BofA’s compensation committee to pick its compensation consultant of choice.
A big clue about how he might rule on this is in his observation on Monday as to the “incredibly bloated compensation of too many executives in too many American companies.”