Taking a Stand
FleetBoston Financial Corp.'s president, Gene McQuade, was in Manhattan on Monday night, scooping up a corporate leadership award on behalf of the company from the Arts & Business Council.
Fleet, based in Boston and set to merge with Charlotte's Bank of America Corp., has tried to raise its profile in New York over the last few years by sponsoring cultural events, from traveling exhibits at the Metropolitan Museum of Art to free performances of the Metropolitan Opera in the parks.
The audience at the gala awards dinner at the Plaza Hotel was chock-full of arts luminaries, but the Bank of America-Fleet deal was not lost on them. Even before Mr. McQuade mentioned the deal in his acceptance speech, the audience was buzzing.
Mr. McQuade, apparently not afraid to pull rank on his soon-to-be colleagues, invoked his coming role as president of the post-merger B of A to reassure the audience of continued arts philanthropy. "I want to assure you that they share ... or they will share ... our commitment to the arts," he said.
Hometown Board
SunTrust Banks Inc. has added another Atlanta business leader to its hometown-flavored board of directors.
J. Hicks Lanier, 63, is the chairman and president of Oxford Industries Inc., an Atlanta clothing manufacturer and marketer. He had been on the banking company's Atlanta advisory board for 20 years.
Besides Mr. Lanier, the 15 directors include L. Phillip Humann, SunTrust's chairman and CEO; retired chairman and CEO James B. Williams; and six other Atlantans, including executives of Coca-Cola Co. and Georgia-Pacific Corp.
The contingent from Coke includes Douglas N. Daft, its chairman and CEO. SunTrust owns 48 million Coke shares; its predecessor Trust Co. of Georgia took the company public in 1919.
Besides naming Mr. Lanier, SunTrust announced that it had split the board's compensation and corporate governance committee into a governance and nominating committee and a compensation committee.
Things to Celebrate
Senior executives of BankAtlantic Bancorp in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., will conclude an investors meeting at the New York Stock Exchange next Tuesday by ringing the closing bell.
The event will celebrate a number of milestones, including a year of seven-day banking and the company's market cap having topped $1 billion, said Leo Hinkley, a vice president who heads investor relations.
Eleven senior executives of the 52-year-old company, including Alan B. Levan, its chairman and CEO, will be present at the exchange. "One of the things we've been trying to get across is the depth of management," Mr. Hinkley said. "It's not just a one-person operation."
Big-League Financier
Elliott McCabe is a VIP in the world of professional sports - not because of anything he has done on the field, but for his role in helping to finance sports businesses.
Mr. McCabe is an investment banker at Bank of America Corp., in Charlotte, whose sports finance and advisory group has helped raise more than $4 billion for leagues, teams, and owners in the past 18 months, according to SportsBusiness Journal, a trade weekly.
The paper recently named Mr. McCabe to its "Top 40 Under 40" list of movers and shakers in the sports business.
Among other things, in the past year Mr. McCabe has helped Daniel Snyder, the owner of the Washington Redskins football team, through a debt restructuring.
Mr. McCabe, who once played football at North Carolina State University, also made the SportsBusiness Journal list last year. But at age 39, he is about to be ineligible.
