Don't you just hate it when a bunch of coworkers get together and give you a big award?
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That was the difficult situation facing Citigroup Inc. chief executive Vikram Pandit last week, as he accepted a leadership award from nonprofit microlender Accion International.
The deck was stacked pretty highly in Pandit's favor. Accion chairwoman Diana Taylor joined Citigroup's board of directors in 2009, a few months before Citigroup executive Michael Schlein was named Accion CEO.
Or as Pandit joked as he accepted his award, "Every once in a while when you need a CEO, you come to Citigroup."
The bank has provided Accion with more than the occasional executive. Citigroup started funding the microlender in 1965, and has since become one of the most vocal U.S. banking advocates of microfinance. Through organizations including Accion, Citigroup has funded loans to small-business owners who would not qualify for traditional bank financing.
Accion celebrated its 50th anniversary on Thursday with a black tie gala in New York, where past and present Citigroup employees were thick on the ground. The chairman of the gala's honorary committee was MasterCard CEO Ajay Banga, a former longtime executive at — do we really have to say it?
And let's not forget another couple of the gala honorary committee members: Sanford I. and Joan H. Weill. Otherwise known as the founder of the modern Citigroup, Sandy Weill welded together several disparate companies into a financial behemoth and arguably created most of the problems that Pandit has spent his tenure at the bank trying to solve.
Pandit's most recent problems have come in the form of Occupy Wall Street and other groups protesting against the banking industry. The Citigroup CEO has tried to appease those protests, but this month saw his conciliatory efforts blow up in his face — or at least in his voicemail inbox.
He could not escape protestors even on Thursday night, but at least this time he was not the main target. Guests arriving at Cipriani for the gala met loud yells and whistles from a crowd of Sotheby's employees, who have been locked out of the auction house for three months during a labor dispute.
The protests were directed against Taylor, who sits on Sotheby's board of directors. But they also took some cues from Occupy Wall Street rhetoric: a flyer the protestors passed out accused Taylor and Sotheby's of being "part of the top one percent."
