Will Dick Parsons Become Citibank CEO?



(image via cencom)

Initial reactions on The Street to Dick Parsons taking over as Chairman of Citibank have been mixed. Charlie Gasparino of The Daily Beast forwards an interesting possibility as to how it will all play out:

"Timing is everything on Wall Street. Just ask Bank America CEO Ken Lewis who purchased Merrill Lynch at a deal initially valued at $29 billion right before Merrill was about to announce a $15 billion fourth-quarter loss that nearly cratered the deal and forced Lewis to seek government assistance. And now we can ask the same question of Dick Parsons, the former head of TimeWarner, who is taking over as chairman of Citigroup at a time when pressure is building on the big bank and a possible government nationalization looms in its future.

"Sources inside Citigroup tell me Parsons, who’s been on Citi’s board since 1996, has been itching for the chairman's job for months now. They say he was critical of the former chairman, the ineffectual investment banker named Sir Win Bischoff, and he wasn't that crazy about the job of Citigroup's CEO Vikram Pandit who inherited a mess of massive losses from his predecessors and made the least of it.

"Judging from the reception he just received from the market, Pandit’s days appear to be numbered. And with Pandit in trouble—some people inside Citigroup tell me he has just a few months to show some progress in turning the bank around or the government may just step in and take it over—Parsons could soon be running the show. And that, I am sorry to say, would make a bad situation even worse."

Dick Parsons was, to be sure, a strange choice. His legacy at Time Warner consisted mostly of cleaning up after Gerry Levin's disastrous AOL-Time Warner merger, staving off shareholder lawsuits and the takeover attempt of Carl Icahn. Vanity Fair's Michael Wolff at Newser sums up:

"He’s very tall, with big hands, and he glides through Manhattan restaurants, patting the maximum number of backs that can be patted in a New York minute.

"And then, when the situation is entirely hopeless, he takes over.

"For most of the decade, he’s run Time Warner. But 'run' would not be the descriptive verb. In a senses, he’s rather let Time Warner be. It’s fate was written by the time he became CEO and Parsons was not arrogant enough or ambitious enough or deluded enough to try to change that fate. He merely accompanied it on its journey to nowhere.

"The depressing note about Parsons stepping up at Citibank is that while he has no demonstrable talents for changing the outcome, he does seem to be able to drag out the inevitable. This is part of why he's been around for so long: Era after era, he just slows everything down. Fate happens in slow motion under Dick’s direction. So the failure of Citigroup—all that angst, all that agony, all that waste of time, energy and taxpayer dough—will take longer to happen with Dick on the job."

The full story here.