Citigroup king is banking on its prince for better or worse

Celebrity chief executive Sandy Weill's succession plan has reinforced suspicions that he is under pressure to leave, writes Gary Silverman.

Citigroup's Sandy Weill is a celebrity chief executive. For better or worse, he has come to personify the biggest bank in the world.

On Wall Street, analysts even speak of a "Sandy Weill premium" that, at times, has boosted the value of Citigroup shares.

However, the notion that Citigroup still needs a single leader in Mr Weill's mould is being challenged by one of its biggest shareholders. The doubts being raised are intriguing because that investor happens to be Mr Weill himself.

Citigroup - which employs around 1,000 people in Dublin - surprised Wall Street last week by revealing a schedule for Sandy Weill's retirement. He will step down as chief executive next year but will remain as chairman until 2006.

Mr Chuck Prince, the lawyer who has headed Citigroup's global corporate and investment bank since September, will take over as chief executive next year. Mr Robert Willumstad, the bank's consumer finance head, will be chief operating officer.

The succession plan amounts to a cultural revolution for Citigroup after an era of one-man rule. Mr Prince and Mr Willumstad were introduced as a team, which makes sense because both are organisation men, good soldiers who have gained influence by meeting Mr Weill's demands. Neither man has Mr Weill's public profile or his range of experience in the retail and wholesale sides of the Citigroup empire.

Nor will Mr Prince or Mr Willumstad enjoy the same authority as their mentor. Mr Weill, who is 70, is leaving but not for three years. Mr Prince is getting the top job but most of the business lines will report to his chief operating officer. Mr Willumstad will oversee consumer finance, the Smith Barney brokerage, investment management, Citigroup's international organisational matrix and the bank's own investments - just about everything other than the global corporate and investment bank, now being run by Mr Prince.

Nonetheless, Mr Weill is giving this arrangement his ultimate endorsement - he is betting on it. Mr Weill owns more than $1 billion in Citigroup stock and his interest in the shares is so intense he has trouble keeping his eyes off his Bloomberg screen when he meets visitors in his office.

"As a big shareholder, I feel very comfortable with my net worth being in the hands of the people we have in our company and people like Bob and Chuck watching over it," he said.

Mr Weill's choice of words - "Bob and Chuck watching over it" - says it all. Mr Weill built Citigroup in a deal-making frenzy and his approach was hands-on. Even as it grew into one of the world's most complex companies, Citigroup retained the feeling of a family business. That is starting to change.

Recently, Mr Weill's management style has become a liability for Citigroup - most notably during investigations into conflicts of interest in Wall Street equity research. Mr Weill, an AT&T director at the time, had to acknowledge that he asked one of his analysts, Mr Jack Grubman, to take a "fresh look" at the company.

Whether Mr Weill was right or wrong - Citigroup wound up paying $400 million in last April's Wall Street settlement - his interaction with Mr Grubman was in character. Love is a rare commodity on Wall Street but it can be said Mr Weill loves his business. Why was he dealing directly with Mr Grubman? Didn't he have better things to do? Guess again.

The question puzzling Wall Street is how a man so single-minded could sign on to such a tortured management structure. If Mr Weill were simply tired, he could leave now.

His half-step towards retirement is reinforcing suspicions that Mr Weill is responding to pressure - explicit or implicit.

Less-charitable souls wonder whether Mr Weill, a man of renowned appetite, is trying to have his cake and eat it, too.

Boards in the US are facing increasing pressure to do the right thing. Given Mr Weill's age, it is hard to believe his directors were leaving the issue of succession completely up to him. Last week, he met the succession challenge - and retained a role in the company for several years.

Mr Prince's appointment is of particular interest to the conspiracy theorists on Wall Street. Mr Prince has little experience running a business but he has spent quality time with regulators. The regulators like him - lawyers like lawyers - and that has led to the theory that Mr Prince has been handed the chief executive job, partly to help the government happy.

The halls of Citigroup's headquarters are alive with denials that anyone other than Mr Weill decided that the time was right for a change. Mr Weill said last week: "This was 100 per cent my initiative at this point in time." Discerning readers will note the last five words of that sentence.

It is this deal-making subtlety that suggests the debate over Mr Weill's motivations will continue. Not for the first time, Mr Weill seems to be up to something. As he said, he has an investment to protect.    - (Financial Times Service)