Sandy Weill would love to run Citigroup again -- but there's no chance

Posted Nov 5th 2007 1:52PM by Amey Stone
Filed under: Management, Apple Inc (AAPL), Dell (DELL), Citigroup Inc. (C)

I can picture Sandy Weill, the former chairman of Citigroup (NYSE: C), now. He's probably pacing the floor of his penthouse apartment, wringing his hands, sweating, perhaps yelling into the phone at someone when he gets a chance. He must be all in a lather about Citigroup's drop in share price (down another 5% so far today to $35.91).

I co-wrote a book about Sandy Weill that came out in 2002 and one thing Mike Brewster and I posited is that Weill would like to run Citigroup until he met his maker. That wasn't in the cards, since he had to step down in 2003 after a series of scandals rocked the bank. And calling Weill the King of Capital, as we did in our book (King of Capital: Sandy Weill and the Making of Citigroup), didn't look so smart not too long after publication either.

Now I've been watching Maria Bartiromo on CNBC reporting that Weill does not want to run Citigroup, but will be happy to help out in the search for a new chief executive. Here's my interpretation: Of course he'd love to jump in and run the company again. He just knows the board could never give him the chance.

Weill essentially built Citigroup through a lifetime of dealmaking, culminating with a flurry of monster mergers in the late 1990s that united his Travelers with Citicorp. He ran Citi with an iron grip until 2003 when he was forced to step down after a series of scandals at the bank. Chuck Prince, one of his most trusted lieutenants and a lawyer by training, got the top job. Now Sandy, whose legacy was badly tarnished in particular by a research scandal involving the infamous Jack Grubman, has to stand by the sidelines as the bank writes down billions in securities and Prince is vilified.

No doubt many shareholders would cheer to have him back at the helm (Bartiromo reports Prince Alwaleed bin Talal has been calling him asking him to step up). When Sandy was running the show, the stock price seemed to only go up. There have been quite a few veteran CEOs to return to their beloved companies after the company took a bad turn -- Chuck Schwab came back to run Schwab (NASDAQ: SCHW), Steve Jobs took on Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL), and Michael Dell recently returned to Dell (NASDAQ: DELL). In some ways it doesn't seem too far-fetched.

But unlike those CEOs, Sandy Weill had to contend with Eliot Spitzer and Securities and Exchange Commission inquiries before he stepped down. Weill is now 74 and deeply involved in numerous philanthropic causes. Some reports say he is even enjoying his more relaxed lifestyle.

I personally would love to see Sandy back on the job -- in part because I think he would quickly get Citigroup back on course and it would be fun to watch from the sidelines. But I don't think there's a chance the Citigroup board would dare make that move now, and maybe even old Sandy really wouldn't want the job himself at this point.

Tags: aapl, Alwaleed, C, charles schwab, CharlesSchwab, ChuckPrince, Citigroup, dell, inthenews, michael dell, MichaelDell, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, PrinceAlwaleedBinTalal, SandyWeill, schw, steve jobs, SteveJobs, wall street, WallStreet

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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

11-05-2007 @ 7:17PM

refreund said...

Yeah, I think he would do well too. I feel bad for all those people who had C in their retirement portfolios. Not a good situation.

I wrote a little piece on Citigroup in my blog: http://www.freundinvesting.com/citigroup.html

Not much, but I think it highlights, briefly, the case for Citigroup to rebound.

-Ryan