Being 34% owned by the U.S. government, Citigroup's (NYSE: C) destiny is somewhat murky. Yet, to pay off the loans, this massive financial institution must shrink. To this end, Citigroup has filed a public offering for its Primerica Financial Services. According to the prospectus, the deal is expected to raise $100 million, but it's likely the amount will be much larger.

Primerica certainly has an interesting history. Back in 1977, an aggressive financial service executive, Arthur Williams, started the company, with the focus on providing term insurance to consumers as well as mutual fund products. However, he had an interesting twist on distribution: he used network marketing. Basically, a Primerica agent would get incentives by recruiting new agents. As a result, the company's growth exploded.

Over the weekend, the New York Post reported that former Citigroup Inc. (NYSE: C) Chief Executive Sandy Weill and his family flew on a company jet for a vacation in Mexico weeks after the New York-based bank received a $45 billion bailout from the federal government and said it would slash 75,000 jobs. Today, the now-disgraced banker said he will give up the perk

According to the Wall Street Journal, "Weill's office said in a statement on Monday morning that `in light of the unprecedented circumstances that Citi finds itself in' he decided to stop using Citi aircraft immediately." Wow, if you did not know any better you would have thought he had given up his left arm instead of a seat on a luxurious jet.

A lot of investors think that the house Sandy Weill built has too many rooms. Citigroup (NYSE: C) operates financial divisions for everything from banking in South America to commodities trading in New York. Many shareholder think that some of these businesses would be better off on their own and that Citi could sell them for nice premiums.

Current management at the big financial company obviously thinks keeping Citi together is a good idea. So far, there has been no move to spin out, or auction off, any of the firm's really large divisions.

Management's reluctance to change the face of Citi has not kept the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees -- a big U.S. union -- from starting a push to pull the financial company apart. According to the FT, "In a letter sent on Friday to Sir Win Bischoff, Citi chairman, Gerald McEntee, Afscme's president, urged Citi's board to "restore shareholder value that is currently trapped in the sprawling financial supermarket approach.""

The board and management at Citi will ignore the plea, and that is too bad. Even though Wall Street was glad that the company's last set of earnings were not worse, they were certainly bad enough. Some analysts see Citi losing money for several more quarters as it continues to write down investments that have been damaged by the credit crisis.

It is hard to defend keeping assets like Smith Barney when they are likely to fetch a large enough sum to shore up Citi's balance sheet. That logic has escaped the powers that run Weill's creation, which is too bad for anyone who has watched the value of Citi drop by more than 50% in the last year.

Douglas A. McIntyre is an editor at 247wallst.com.

MAJOR PAPERS:

• In what may trump a GBP1.6B bid from a private-equity led consortium consisting of The Goldman Sachs Group Inc's (NYSE: GS) Goldman Sachs Capital Partners, Candover Investment (OTC: CDRIF), and Alpinvest, Expro International Group (OTC: EXPRF) said it received a GBP1.71B bid proposal from Halliburton Company (NYSE: HAL), the Wall Street Journal reported. Expro said the proposal "does not amount to a firm intention to make an offer and is subject to certain preconditions."
• The Wall Street Journal also reported that the oil industry and some U.S. lawmakers are looking to end long-standing bans on domestic drilling put in place to protect areas that are environmentally-sensitive, fueled by concerns about global energy.
• In an interview with the Financial Times, Citigroup Incorporated's (NYSE: C) former chairman and CEO Sandy Weill acknowledged that choosing Chuck Prince as his successor in 2003 turned out not to be the "right thing" for the company and was flawed. Instead of handing the job to Prince, Weill said the board should have fostered competition among the bank's top managers for the job.

OTHER PAPERS:

• According to the Washington Post, MedImmune, a unit of drug giant AstraZeneca Plc (NYSE: AZN),settled with Genentech Inc (NYSE: DNA) a lawsuit over a patented component of its best-selling drug Synagis, which is aimed at preventing respiratory infections in infants. No details of the settlement were provided.

TheStreet.com's Jim Cramer says AIG's Sullivan joins the "formers" at Citi and Marsh & McLennan as Eliot Spitzer's appointee failures.

Three strikes, and Spitzer's guys should all be out.

That's my thoughts about this Martin Sullivan/AIG (NYSE: AIG) (Cramer's Take) scandal. Remember that Sullivan was basically appointed to run AIG by Eliot Spitzer after he kicked out Hank Greenberg for a laundry list of bad deeds. Just like Chuck Prince was appointed to run Citigroup (NYSE: C) (Cramer's Take) when Spitzer booted Sandy Weill, and Mike Cherkasky was appointed to run Marsh & McLennan (NYSE: MMC) (Cramer's Take) when Spitzer axed Jeffrey Greenberg.

All three men were brought in to clean up the mess. Both Prince and Cherkasky were lawyers who were way over their heads as operators.

Prince presided over the destruction of a great American bank -- although it was kind of a re-destruction in light of how bad it was in 1990 -- when he allowed billions in off-balance-sheet borrowings that he simply did not understand.

BusinessWeek interviewed former Citigroup Inc. (NYSE: C) CEO Sandy Weill about a range of topics regarding Citi's performance and prospects as well as its efforts to raise capital. He defends the complex business structure he created and declines to reveal how much he invested in its latest round.

After reading the interview, I get the impression that he still wields tremendous power over Citigroup and that it could be stuck with its current corporate strategy until Weill departs from the scene. His defense of the current corporate strategy is not compelling, at least not to me. Arguing against breaking up Citi, he says, "One of the advantages of the company is that it is in 100-plus different countries and has diversity in income streams."

He continued by defending the merits of this diversification. "Since the merger of Citi and Travelers in 1998, we've had a big corporate business and we've had a big consumer business. We've watched times when the consumer business did poorly and the corporate business did very well. Now, we're watching a time where the global consumer business has done well, whereas the U.S. consumer business has had to add to loan loss reserves. Over time, they balance out."

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.

The New York Times raises an important question facing Citigroup (NYSE: C) and Merrill Lynch (NYSE: MER) -- is the financial supermarket -- an idea pushed by former Citigroup CEO Sandy Weill -- an idea whose time is past? I think it's time to kill this failed concept -- it's bad for customers, employees, and shareholders.

Twenty-five years ago, I won a competition at the consulting firm where I worked to advise an insurance company about how it should respond to the financial supermarket idea. Back then, Sandy Weill had taken his brokerage firm -- Shearson -- and merged it with Lehman Brothers (NYSE: LEH) and ultimately American Express Co. (NYSE: AXP) to create a company where someone could get all their personal financial needs taken care of under one roof. My job was to find other companies that this insurance company could buy to implement the financial supermarket concept.

But the financial supermarket is a non-starter from the customer's standpoint. It doesn't even work inside the institution where it's housed. After Sandy Weill got kicked out of American Express, he tried to rebuild the concept from scratch -- starting with Commercial Credit and extending to Travelers Co. (NYSE: TRV) and ultimately merging it all together into Citigroup. This is all well described in Amey Stone's King of Capital.

I was wondering when the bloom was going to be off Chuck Prince's rose when he took over from financial legend Sandy Weill at Citigroup, Inc. (NYSE: C) years back. Since Weill engineered some of the most stunning financial company mergers in the last few decades and positioned Citi to become the pre-eminent financial services company on a global scale, Prince had quite a bit to live up to.

Is that effort already over so short a time into Prince's tenure? As Peter Cohan wrote yesterday, Citi is possibly looking to buy a hedge fund to get access to one of its managers and folding him into Citi's alternative assets group -- no big surprises were coming forward. Oh wait -- I forgot -- Prince wants to can 5.2% of the Citi workforce (upwards of 17,000 people) in Citi's largest restructuring in over 10 years. On top of that, Prince intends to send 9,500 additional positions into "lower-cost locations." Maybe he's been talking to Circuit City's CEO or something. And as Douglas McIntyre mentioned, other banks aren't making such cuts.

If it's true that all these cuts are meant to save money and to get Citi's alternative assets arm bringing in some impressive returns and business, then that's the company's right. Or is it? I just love it when thousands of job cuts meant to trim excess expenses wait until the last second. Could Citi have needed these layoffs a few years ago? Probably -- there is almost always excess capacity in any company just waiting for the ax.

It seems like leaders wait until prompted by something to take action, which is a ludicrous mistake. RIF, right-sizing, what ever you want to call it, are usually a last-ditch effort to get profitability up by reducing expenses. They are not a sound business move meant to align the company's business needs with its headcount.

[Disclosure: I own C shares as of 4-12-07]