Barclays.
Bank annual meeting season is fun this year because the scandals aren't grim complicated mortgage-crisis-and-Libor-type scandals, but bizarre follies like Wells Fargo & Co.'s fake accounts and Barclays PLC's whistle-blowing scandal. In that one, CEO Jes Staley tried to unmask a whistle-blowerwho complained about another senior Barclays executive, which you are really not supposed to do. The board gave Staley a "very significant compensation adjustment," but then he and Chairman John McFarlane also had to stand up in front of the shareholders and take some abuse. Fortunately they had good answers:
“You know me. If I believe he should go, you know he would go,” said Mr. McFarlane, who is dubbed “Mack the Knife” because of his track record in axing top executives. He said Mr. Staley had “gone through a red light” and “when you go through a red light you don’t lose your license.”
Mr. Staley had made a mistake and wasn’t planning to do anything malicious to the whistleblower, he said. “All he wanted to do was phone them up and ask them to stop sending the letters,” he said.
I have been pretty critical of Staley's behavior in the past, because trying to retaliate against whistle-blowers, even when you are sure that they are wrong and malicious, really does defeat the purpose of having a whistle-blower program. But I am sympathetic to this excuse; if I were the CEO of a bank, getting people to stop contacting me would be a big part of my day-to-day work. I am not entirely sure that Staley just wanted to have a friendly chat with the person who, in his view, was making unfounded anonymous attacks on his friend, but I guess if it's good enough for Mack the Knife it's good enough for me.
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