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The claim comes in a new presentation by Starboard Value obtained by BuzzFeed and expected to be made public Tuesday morning.
Keith Bedford / Reuters / Reuters
Activist hedge fund Starboard Value is turning up the heat in its battle with Red Lobster owner Darden Restaurants, releasing two detailed presentations calling the company's plans to spin off the seafood restaurant chain the "wrong spinoff of the wrong restaurant chain for the wrong reasons."
In the presentations obtained by BuzzFeed, which total 207 pages and are expected to be made public Tuesday morning, Starboard, the owner of a 5.6% stake in Darden, says the company's shareholders could lose up to $850 million in value if the spinoff goes ahead as planned — something the hedge fund, run by Jeffrey Smith and other activist investors, including 2% owner Barington Capital, are trying to stop. They've called for a special shareholder vote on the matter ahead of Darden's annual meeting, which is slated for September, months after the company's desired closing date for the deal of May 26. Thus far, Darden management has refused to call such a meeting, stating it would prefer to communicate directly with shareholders on the issue.
Only a few weeks ago, Darden posted its latest in a string of weak quarterly earnings. The company's history of poor results with the Olive Garden and Red Lobster brands led Barington to propose a division of the company into two units late last year, one consisting of its Olive Garden and Red Lobster brands and another its faster-growing restaurant chains such as The Capital Grille and LongHorn Steakhouse, as well as the creation of a publicly traded real estate investment trust for the property it owns.
Darden responded to Barington's proposal by saying it would pursue a sale or spinoff of the Red Lobster brand only. Both Barington and Starboard believe that move will rob shareholders of value and that keeping Red Lobster and Olive Garden together will ultimately make them both worth more.
Starboard also claims in its presentation that Darden's real estate is conservatively worth around $4 billion, and, if separated, could add another $1 to $2 billion in additional shareholder value. Starboard says that additional value would be jeopardized if Darden spins off Red Lobster on its own.
Starboard's presentation concludes with a reminder that Darden's entire board is up for reelection mere months after the proposed special shareholder vote. (For its part, Barington last week sent a letter to the independent directors of Darden's board saying they should consider finding a new CEO and appointing an independent chairman.)
"The Special Meeting will provide an alternative forum for shareholders to show the Board that Darden's shareholders will not stand to be silenced on this critical issue," Starboard says in its presentation. "Given their poor track record, management and the Board should not be trusted to rush this critical decision."
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What’s more material and non-public than overheard conversations between husband and wife.
A healthy martial relationship is built on a foundation of communication and trust. One that ends in settlements over insider trading charges is allegedly built on communication and a violation of trust.
The Securities and Exchange Commission reached settlements with two men in the Bay Area, Tyrone Hawk and Ching Hwa Chen, over charges that they overheard work calls made by their wives and then traded on the information.
The SEC says that Hawk overheard calls his wife, who worked at Oracle, made where she mentioned the company's plan to buy Acme Packet, a hardware company. Oracle announced its $1.7 billion acqusition in February of last year for $29.25 a share, 22% more than Acme Packet's stock price of $23.93. According to the SEC's complaint, Hawk's wife told him that "there was a blackout window for trading Oracle securities because Oracle was in the process of acquiring another company."
The SEC's legalistic language describes a subsequent major violation of marital trust: "Despite his wife's admonitions about trading, Hawk misappropriated this information for his own benefit by purchasing over $600,000 worth of Acme Packet shares over the next two weeks." Hawk's wife had been working on due dilligence for Oracle, according to the complaint.
The SEC says Hawk made $151,480 after selling off his Acme Packet stake. Hawk settled the charges without admitting or denying the SEC's claims for more than $300,000. "Hawk also knew, or was reckless in not knowing, that he violated the duty of trust and confidence owed to his wife by trading in Acme Packet securities on the basis of material nonpublic information he misappropriated from her," the SEC claims.
The second case originated from a summer drive from San Jose to Reno for a short vacation, the SEC says. In this case, the SEC claims that Ching Hwa Chen had overheard the calls his wife, a finance official at the software company Informatica, made and noticed "her unusual work schedule" in June of 2012.
The SEC says that Chen's wife was working overtime because Informatica was preparing to disclose that it would miss its revenue guidance for the first time in more than 7 years. She was working so much that she was making business calls on he way to Reno, but "normally, when Chen's wife took a vacation day, she did not work," the complaint says. But this trip was different: "Chen's wife spent almost the entirety of the approximately four hour drive on business phone calls to finalize Informatica's quarterly financial results. Chen drove and overheard the substance of those calls."
The SEC says that Chen, despite being told by his wife not to trade, made a short bet on Informatica and bought options that would pay off if the price went down, which it did by 27% a few days later, for profits of $138,068.
"Chen knew, or was reckless in not knowing, that he violated the duty of trust and confidence owed to his wife by trading in Informatica securities on the basis of material nonpublic information he learned from her and her behavior," the complaint says. Chen settled with the SEC for $280,000 and did not admit or deny the charges.
Last year, the SEC charged a former Dow Chemical executive of leaking information he learned from his live-in girlfriend to a broker and his friend from high school.
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Lewis and an IEX representative denied the claim. A source who received the email passed it along to BuzzFeed.
Michael Lewis' new book Flash Boys, which was released today and opened at No. 1 on Amazon, is already attracting fierce criticism, including an email that has been circulating today written by the head of electronic execution at BNP Paribas, John Nunziata.
Nunziata sent an email to clients obtained by BuzzFeed saying that Lewis "has a stake in IEX, which was not disclosed in the story."
Gerald Lam, a spokesman for IEX, told BuzzFeed, "Michael Lewis is not an investor in IEX." In a Facebook post, Lewis said, "I have no such stake."
Requests to Nunziata and BNP Paribas's press office were not returned.
BNP Paribas has a variety of algorithmic trading products, mostly in foreign exchange, including one called Cortex iX, which "uses artificial intelligence concepts and multiple sets of execution rules, and is able to adapt its behavior mid-execution," according to the trade publication FX Week.
Lewis' book chronicles the rise of high-frequency trading in the stock market. Lewis said in an interview with 60 Minutes last night that the algorithmic trading programs have "rigged" the U.S. stock market. Critics of high-frequency trading say that by literally setting up their computers closer to the physical location of exchanges and other tactics, the high-frequency traders are able to see orders from institutional traders and build in a guaranteed profit by trading ahead of them.
"The United States stock market, the most iconic market in global capitalism, is rigged," Lewis said on 60 Minutes, "by a combination of the stock exchanges, the big Wall Street banks, and high-frequency traders."
The book profiles Brad Katsuyama, a former Royal Bank of Canada trader who founded an exchange, IEX, that is specifically designed to erode the advantages of high-frequency traders. Katsuyama started IEX because while at RBC, he would try to buy stocks on behalf of clients and more and more, the orders couldn't be filled at the posted price.
All,
As many you saw last night on 60 minutes or are hearing about today, there is a "new" exchange IEX to combat High Frequency Trading. IEX is being sponsored and pushed by buy-side firms as they are the main investors and believe in the story. Michael Lewis also has a stake in IEX, which was not disclosed in the story. IEX is currently "transitioning" from a dark pool to a lit exchange. So where does BNP stand with connectivity to IEX?
BNP will access IEX via two separate connections. This is different than most connectivity we maintain as we will have a direct connection and integration into our dark pool strategies. These connections will be completed at the end of the week as all paperwork is submitted to IEX and we are awaiting production validation and release.
Direct Connection
BNP clients will be able to access IEX directly through BNP connectivity once their EMS is certified with these updates via our electronic offering. The trading desk will also have the ability to enter orders directly into IEX via Optime upon customer's requests.
Dark Pool Integration
BNP has also added IEX as a destination on our proprietary dark pool strategies Dark and Dark Plus. This functionality is currently available to electronic and high touch clients.
Please reach out if you have any additional questions.
Have a good week.
John
Wall Street’s chief enforcement agent, Preet Bharara, said in a speech before the Security Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA) that it won’t be too long before “a significant financial institution will be charged with a felony or be made to plead guilty to a felony.” Bharara has been a leading advocate for holding institutions themselves, and not just people, accountable for crimes and has aggressively been going after financial firms and white-collar criminals in particular.
Allison Joyce / Reuters
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BuzzFeed
But these were not intelligence officials. Instead, according to two people familiar with the matter, they were compliance investigators working on assignment for the headquarters of American technology giant Cisco. The company was auditing itself and the investigators were the corporate version of an internal affairs squad: Were Cisco executives bribing corrupt Russian officials? Was that the secret to the company’s booming business in the region?
The men sat one Russian Cisco executive down in a conference room and shut the door. One investigator opened a dossier and they began asking rapid-fire questions, according to someone who was in the room. Was Cisco paying bribes in Russia? Was money being diverted to government officials?
The Russian Cisco executive just shrugged. In heavily accented English he told the Westerners, “Everyone in Russia takes money and pays money. You can’t have business in Russia without that.” But he knew nothing specific, he insisted.
“It’s like sex,” he told the interviewers. “I know that you have sex. But with whom? How often? In what position? This I don’t know.”
Now, four years later, the iconic American firm is facing a federal investigation for possible bribery violations on a massive scale in Russia. At the heart of the probe by the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission, sources tell BuzzFeed, are allegations that for years Cisco, after selling billions of dollars worth of routers, communications equipment, and networks to Russian companies and government entities, routed what may have amounted to tens of millions of dollars to offshore havens including Cyprus, Tortola, and Bermuda.
Cisco disclosed the federal probe in a February SEC filing. The company says it takes the allegations seriously and has hired the white-shoe law firm WilmerHale to conduct an internal investigation that the federal government requested. Cisco declined to comment further.
Attorneys at WilmerHale did not return phone calls seeking comment. The SEC and the Department of Justice also would not discuss the case.
Until now, details of how Cisco allegedly paid bribes in Russia have not been reported. But two former Cisco insiders have described to BuzzFeed what they say was an elaborate kickback scheme that used intermediary companies and went on until 2011. And, they said, Cisco employees deliberately looked the other way.
The case is important not only for one of American’s most prestigious and innovative technology companies, valued at $110 billion. It comes just as the dispute over Ukraine puts the United States and Russia in their gravest military and diplomatic face-off in decades — and as the U.S. tries to strike financially at Russian President Vladimir Putin and the country’s oligarchs. If the allegations against Cisco are true, they would implicate a major American corporation in the corrupt system that the U.S. is now trying to sanction, the system that props up Putin and the confidants he has installed in key Russian ministries and companies.
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev works on the computer as Cisco Chairman and CEO John Chambers, Jim Grubb, chief demonstration officer, and California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger watch at Cisco headquarters June 23, 2010, in San Jose, Calif.
David Paul Morris / Getty Images
Cisco entered the Russian market in 1995. In 2007, a top Cisco official told Businessweek that “as we look globally to where the next venture asset class is going to emerge, it is definitely Russia and Central and Eastern Europe.”
The company does not usually make public its sales in Russia, and it declined to provide those figures to BuzzFeed. It says that Russia and some other former Soviet countries make up less then 2% of its revenue, and 2% adds up to a little under $1 billion. But growth seems to have been phenomenal. From 2010 to 2011, sales in Russia rose 63%, according to one rare public revelation in an SEC filing.
In 2010 Russian’s then-President Dimitry Medvedev paid a visit to Cisco’s sprawling San Jose, Calif., headquarters — a virtual town unto itself. During Medvedev’s visit, Cisco CEO John T. Chambers announced that the firm was investing $1 billion in a pet project of Medvedev, a high-tech innovation center that was envisioned as a “Russian Silicon Valley.”
No one is suggesting that Cisco bribed Russia's top leaders. Instead, the investigation is centered on day-to-day kickbacks to officials who ran or helped run major state agencies or companies. Such kickbacks, according to the allegations, enabled the firm to dominate Russia’s market for IT infrastructure.
The Russian word for kickback is otkat, which translates directly into “roll back” — as in a ball rolling back down a hill. It has been part of Russian culture for generations. Revolutionary poet Vladimir Mayakovsky penned a satirical “Hymn to the Bribe” in 1915, and the writer Erast Pertsoff authored a book in 1830 called the Art of Bribe Taking, in which he called bribes “the road to happiness.”
Otkat is now endemic in Russia, which is listed as one of the most corrupt countries in the world by Transparency International. Indeed, Vladimir Putin’s own campaign chief in 2012 announced, "Today we have returned to 'normal,' 'civilized' corruption.” (He was trying to emphasize an improvement over the outright thievery of the 1990s.)
But U.S. law bans American companies and citizens from paying off foreign officials to get business. Under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, or FCPA, violators can be punished with prison sentences of five years for each bribery count. And even more serious are the penalties for doctoring records to conceal bribes — up to 20 years.
Last year, according to sources close to the investigation, a whistleblower came forward to the SEC, sketching out a vast otkat scheme and providing documents as evidence. In some FCPA cases, whistleblowers are eligible to receive 10 to 30% of fines that companies pay to the government.
Like other companies in technology and software, Cisco often markets its products through a system of resellers and distributors — middlemen. So in Russia, Cisco didn’t sell directly to the Russian government or companies. In its SEC filing disclosing the federal investigation, Cisco stated that the allegations involved “certain resellers of the Company's products.”
Indeed, it’s in the system of middlemen where kickbacks flourished, according to two former Cisco sales executives who spoke to BuzzFeed. One of the former Cisco employees explained it like this: In the 1990s in Russia, bribery was often simple. “People would bring bags of cash to people’s offices.” But Cisco, he said, “introduced a new way of giving bribes. They were innovative. This system with the resellers and the rebates offered an opportunity of giving money without getting your hands dirty, so you could get money to offshore accounts.” It's not clear when the alleged scheme started up, but the former executives said it went on for years until 2011, when it stopped.
A kickback usually means giving money back to officials in exchange for steering business your way. And it’s usually complicated, with the money getting passed through different hands to disguise what’s really happening.
The two former Cisco executives laid out for BuzzFeed how the alleged scheme worked:
In Cisco’s Russia operations, funds for kickbacks were built into the large discounts Cisco gave certain middleman distributors that were well-connected in Russia. The size of the discounts are head-turning, usually 35% to 40%, but sometimes as high as 68% percent off the list price.
And there was a catch: Instead of discounting equipment in the normal way, by lowering the price, parts of the discounts were often structured as rebates: Cisco sent money back to the middlemen after a sale. Some intermediaries were so close to the Russian companies and government agencies — Cisco’s end customers — that these intermediaries functioned as their agents.
These middleman companies would direct the rebate money to be sent to bank accounts in offshore havens such as Cyprus, the British Virgin Islands, or Bermuda.
The former Cisco employees said they do not know who owns or controls those offshore accounts — in other words, who ultimately received the rebates. But they said the rebates were actually kickbacks. As one of them put it, “The main logic behind the rebates was to make sure they were able to stimulate, materially stimulate, the officials” who worked for the government entities.
In Russia, Cisco had at least 18 major middleman distributors that it calls “partners,” of which BuzzFeed was able to find contact information for 15. One official of a Cisco distributor called Marvel, Denis Golotcha, laughed and was dismissive of these allegations when reached by BuzzFeed by phone in late March. “I think it is a good first of April joke,” he said. “But it is a little early.”
“I cannot confirm any information about rebates,” he added. He asked for questions in an email, but did not respond to the email. None of the other companies responded to requests for comment.
The Cisco Engineering Center office building at Skolkovo near Moscow.
KOROTAYEV ARTYOM / ITAR-TASS / Landov
There are indications that Cisco received some warnings about its Russian operations. In 2008, for example, according to a draft report marked “CISCO HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL – CONTROLLED ACCESS” and obtained by BuzzFeed, outside auditors specifically listed a “high” legal risk for Cisco, because of “transactions with entities in ‘tax haven’ countries.” The draft, which a source said was delivered to Cisco, lists one Russian Cisco reseller based in Cyprus and another located in Tortola, the British Virgin Islands.
The Department of Justice has drawn up guidelines to explain the FCPA law so that companies don’t violate it. The guidelines specify signs to watch out for, including “unreasonably large discounts to third-party distributors” and cases in which the intermediary “requests payment to offshore bank accounts”
Jessica Tillipman teaches corruption law at George Washington University and is the senior editor of The FCPA Blog. Told of the allegations about Cisco, she said, “It’s full of red flags. It’s got the typical factors you see in FCPA cases: big rebates, offshore payments, government agencies.”
Still, a major challenge for investigators might be connecting the offshore accounts to Russian officials — in other words, determining if the rebates were actually kickbacks.
One of the former Cisco officials said that he and other employees studiously ignored where the money was going. When those issues came up during talks with middlemen and the government, he said, “I left the room. They said, ‘You can stay,’ and I said, ‘I don’t want to.’ Officially we didn’t participate in discussions about payback, otkat.”
The Justice Department, in its 130-page guidelines to the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, says that the law is meant to punish not just those who know whether bribes are being paid, but also “those who purposefully avoid actual knowledge.” A former Justice Department official, told of the case, said, “The ostrich defense does not work.” The legal standard to prosecute is that “you need to be aware that there is a high probability that a bribe can be paid.”
The two former Cisco sales executives told BuzzFeed they know of at least one case in which Cisco officials participated directly in talks about kickbacks. And the Russian company Cisco was doing business with is one that is ultimately controlled by the powerful oligarch Vladimir Ivanovich Yakunin, who reportedly has had a dacha near Putin's. After the Crimea crisis broke, the 65-year-old Yakunin was sanctioned by the United States.
Yakunin is the longtime boss of Russian Railways, the national railroad conglomerate. It owns a subsidiary, Transtelecom, or TTK, which provides internet service across the country. The former Cisco executives said some Cisco officials met directly with TTK executives in 2010 at Cisco’s office, where they negotiated the size of the discount and the rebates.
While there was already one intermediary in the deal, TTK allegedly wanted another middleman company to step in, a company that it controlled.
One of the former Cisco employees told BuzzFeed that TTK “created a small company — as a reseller — and insisted that Cisco sign them as a partner. Cisco could sell through the small company. All the otkat, the payback, accumulated through this small company and all this profit accumulated in this small company. And this was a special scheme to send the profit outside of Russia.”
In an email statement to BuzzFeed, TTK spokeswoman Ekaterina Zaytseva wrote that the firm couldn’t comment because “we've never heard about this story around Cisco before you contacted us.” All contracting with TTK, she added, is “determined during the open bidding procedures,” as required by Russian law.
Over the last three years, much has changed for Cisco in Russia. In 2011, disgruntled Cisco officials in Russia addressed a letter, obtained by BuzzFeed, to Cisco CEO Chambers. In stilted English, it lays out the otkat allegations: Cisco paid rebates “to offshore companies belonging to owners of Distributors, System Integrators and other Partners working in Russia. We have information that these offshore accounts can be sued to facilitate ‘black money’ to corrupt government officials.”
Around that time, according to the former Cisco executives, the company halted its system of large-scale rebates to offshore accounts, though large discounts continued.
Reporter Aram Roston can be reached at aram.roston@buzzfeed.com.
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The CEO received $18 million in total compensation for 2013, following a year in which Morgan Stanley’s stock shot up 64%.
James Gorman, chairman and chief executive officer of Morgan Stanley.
Bloomberg/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman will receive $18 million in compensation for 2013, an 85% raise from 2012, according to a regulatory filing. Gorman has overseen a near-wholesale transformation of the bank and has returned it to profitability by shifting its focus toward more conservative businesses like wealth and asset management.
The 85% raise includes a base salary of $1.5 million, a $316,000 bonus, $5 million in deferred pay, $5 million in stock and options awards, and $6 million in incentive payments for the bank's performance. It still pales in comparison to the pay of the leader of Morgan Stanley's main rival, Goldman Sachs, whose chairman and CEO Lloyd Blankfein got $23 million in 2013.
The pay jump follows a banner year for the company — its stock jumped up 64% in 2013, compared to 33% for an index of financial stocks. The bank was able to win approval from the Federal Reserve to double its quarterly dividend to 10 cents a share and buy back $1 billion in stock over the coming year.
The successful year, which followed a small net loss in 2012, was buoyed by buying out Citigroup's remaining stake in its jointly owned wealth management unit Morgan Stanley Smith Barney. In 2013, Morgan Stanley got 68% of its profits from wealth and asset management; in 2006, when the bank was trying to match Goldman Sachs in trading and investment banking, only 15% of its profits came from wealth and asset management.
Via Bloomberg
MF Global alleges that without PwC’s accounting advice, the company would have never made the trades that led to its eventual bankruptcy
Shannon Stapleton / Reuters / Reuters
The parent company MF Global, the brokerage firm lead by Jon Corzine that went bankrupt in November, 2011, sued the company's accounting firm, PwC in federal court in Manhattan today.
The company alleges that PwC showed "extraordinary and egregious professional malpractice and negligence" as the auditor and outside accountants for the brokerage company. The suit specifically blames the accounting firm for allowing the firm to use an accounting treatment for a series of trades on the debt of distressed European countries that ultimately drained the firm of its cash and led to its collapse.
The over $6 billion trade was masterminded, according to several accounts, reports, and lawsuits, by its then-CEO Jon Corzine, the former co-chairman of Goldman Sachs who also served as a New Jersey senator and governor.
In the course of its unraveling, some $1.6 billion that was supposed to be kept in segregated customer accounts was misplaced and a series of lawsuits allege the money was used to prop up the rest of the company. Most of the customer money has since been recovered. MF Global, which had just over $40 billion in assets at the time of its bankruptcy, was one of the largest corporate collapses of all time.
The suit says that MF Global got "flatly erroneous accounting advice" when it came to how it should account for the European debt trade; PwC is alleged to have "negligently advised" MF Global that it could say the trades were sales and record revenue almost two years before the company would actually receive the cash from its investment.
Without the sign-off from PwC that let MF Global account for the trades that way, the suit claims, MF Global "would never have amassed the enormous" exposure to incredibly risky European sovereign debt that ended up bankrupting the company.
The company claims that it lost more than $1 billion thanks to PwC's advice.
MF Global's lawsuit is separate from civil suits against Corzine himself. Earlier this week, Corzine failed to get a district judge in Manhattan to throw out a suit brought against him by MF Global's creditors.
Accounting and auditing firms often receive legal scrutiny following the bankruptcy of companies they work for. Investors in the bankrupt investment bank Lehman Brothers sued Ernst & Young for what it claimed were misstatements in Lehman's financial reports that let the firm hide the true condition of its balance sheet. The suit was settled late last year for $99 million.
Corzine is also facing suits from MF Global shareholders, as well as the firm's primary regulator, the Commodities Futures Trading Commission. The CFTC's suit against Corzine and the firm's assistant treasurer at the time of its collapse, Edith O'Brien, claims that Corzine was "aware of the firm's true low cash balance" as it was collapsing in late October and ordered his subordinates to move significant amounts of cash around "without inquiring how the firm could come up with the money to do so."
PwC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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The CEO of SFX Entertainment, which went public in October, was caught on camera earlier this week leaving a plane flicking off photographers and grabbing his private parts. An analyst questioned his sanity on a conference call yesterday.
SFX Entertainment, the newly public company that produces electronic music festivals like Tomorrowland and Electric Zoo, had one of the most awkward earnings calls in history on Thursday.
A big point of contention: the above video, and related images, which feature SFX founder and Chief Executive Officer Robert Sillerman exiting an airplane in Miami earlier this week, throwing up the middle finger to onlookers and grabbing his private parts. The images spread on Twitter and Instagram this week.
Doug Mitchelson, an analyst at Deutsche Bank, had trouble holding back laughter as he asked Sillerman on the call: "And lastly, Bob, I'm not even sort of sure how to ask this question...we understand that you're something of a non-traditional CEO, but any comment you want to make on the gestures you were making? Was that to a specific person or to everybody as you came out of the plane yesterday? We're just trying to make sure that you're still sane."
Sillerman, who's in his mid-60s, responded: "Um, well — thank you for referring to me as a non-traditional CEO. That was a result of an internal, the culmination of an internal conversation and joke within the company, and while I certainly wasn't crazy about the fact that it was tweeted out, it's had a very interesting reaction from the uh, music community down here, (which) has fundamentally said, "Fuck yeah, we get it."
He continued: "But no, I was not trying to imitate Michael Jackson or Stephen Colbert talking to somebody about how much better the hot dogs were in New York. That was an internal thing. It's fairly indicative, I think, of the way internally that we enjoy ourselves, and we're willing to push the envelope, I guess is the best way to say it."
Mitchelson thanked Sillerman, who answered: "Now Doug, you weren't concerned it was aimed at you, were you?"
Mitchelson chuckled and said, "It seemed more general than that." Sillerman responded, "Yeah."
TheStreet notes that there were other uncomfortable moments throughout the profanity-filled call, including an accusation from one analyst that the company was trying to brush over "shitty deals" through accounting adjustments.
SFX, which went public in October at $13 a share, fell 12% yesterday and another 1% today to around $6.75. The company posted sales of $170.5 million for 2013 and a net loss of $111.9 million.
Sillerman, who was in Miami for the Ultra music festival, initially made his fortune by buying and selling radio stations, then spent the '90s combining regional concert promoters into the precursor of what is now Live Nation. He established SFX as an electronic dance music company in July 2011, seeing a compelling opportunity in the culture around the genre.
Investors sent shares of King.com down more than 15% in its debut as a public company . But why did King bother going public in the first place?
Brendan Mcdermid / Reuters
Once you're lucky, twice you're good — except in the gaming industry, in which case it's once you're lucky, twice you're a god.
Every few years, a game company produces a single major hit that launches it into the stratosphere. In 2009, Zynga released FarmVille, a game that produced so much money that an entire massive gaming company was built around it. After that it was Draw Something, which turned the otherwise desperate OMGPOP into an overnight sensation that sold for $210 million to Zynga in 2012. And also beginning in 2012, it was King's Candy Crush Saga, which went on to arguably become the most popular mobile game of all time, bringing in billions of dollars for its parent company.
Yet none of those three companies have a follow-up to show, and indeed, not many game companies, mobile or traditional, do. Those that have are essentially legends: Valve, with Counter Strike and Half Life 2, along with a number of other games; Blizzard, with World of Warcraft and Starcraft 2; studios owned by larger companies like Naughty Dog, with the Uncharted Series, and BioWare with its Mass Effect games. Among all of them are two common traits: they, at least for the time being, are robust businesses, and they produce expensive games that require a larger ensemble team spanning artists, creative designers, engineers and acting talent.
But what would it take for a mobile company like Zynga, OMGPOP or King to actually be able to not only survive, but thrive as a large publicly-traded company?
The problem for the Zyngas, Kings and other mobile gaming companies is that the technical barriers for their kinds of games that used to exist, simply do not any more. The next hit can come out of nowhere, from a single person, and blow more pedigreed games off the App Store charts: Flappy Bird went from completely nonexistent to dominating the Apple App Store, and made its owner what was reported to be hundreds of thousands of dollars in advertising revenue the month that it was live.
The financial edge more modern mobile gaming companies had is beginning to wane. With the emergence of Facebook's mobile app install ads, targeting for app installs gets better and better every day, giving a smaller team a better chance of finding the right group of gamers to install the game and then spread it to their friends. (Think games like the tile-matching game like 2048, Dots, Flappy Bird, and the quiz game QuizUp.)
And this trend may eventually even extend to AAA studios. One of the most important edges that companies like Activision and Electronic Arts have enjoyed — the ability to pay the immense upfront cost for a technically-demanding game — is starting to taper off thanks to cheap development technologies like Unity. When asked by BuzzFeed at a panel last week, Unity CEO David Helgason said the company is "pretty damn close" to having the technology to allow a few designers in a garage to essentially create a game like Bioshock Infinite.
It takes more than a tiny team to make a game this beautiful — but as time goes on, the technical barriers to a graphically-advanced 3D game like Bioshock Infinite are also shrinking.
AP Photo/2K Games/Irrational Games
For a higher-end studio, which requires a mixture of creative artists, engineers, designers and a staff with the business wherewithal to keep the company running, amassing talent makes a bit more sense. After all, Bioshock Infinite isn't Bioshock Infinite without its beautiful art direction and deep storytelling.
But with the difficulty and costs of producing even technically-demanding games dropping like a rock, it's a better time than ever for an independent developer to set off and try to build the next major game. Of course, it isn't easy — in fact most games, like most startups, will fail — but the possibility exists today that didn't exist five years ago.
And outcomes abound for developers beyond building a giant gaming company and trying to take it public. The most obvious pathway would be to do what Mojang, the creator of Minecraft, has done: build a killer game and quietly make an enormous amount of money with a small team, leading to huge profit margins for the company. That money could be reinvested in a new game, or paid out as a huge dividend to employees for their hard work — and in that case, the developers could even make more than they would through an outright exit.
Alternatively, companies can go the route of Supercell, which basically sold half its company in a financing deal where the company raised $1 billion from Softbank. This is more of a direct obvious exit for founders and the company, and then gives a company with a large platform — in this case, a telecommunications provider — access to the IP to better sell products.
But if King's public debut was any kind of indication, going public with a single hit — even if it is the most popular game of all time — does not bode well for the purposes of building a long-lasting company.
Ironically, one of the most successful gaming companies of all time was actually a hardware company. Nintendo has produced games that are beloved by gamers — and still does today — but those games are built solely for its platforms like the Wii and the Nintendo 3DS. That Nintendo is beginning to falter is not a sign that it is no longer making good games, but rather that it can't produce hardware that can compete with companies like Apple.
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The sales would add to the Treasury’s profit in running TARP, the massive bank bailout program.
AdamParent/AdamParent
Treasury announced today that it would sell its remaining preferred stock and debt of five smaller banks that were recipients of funding from its bank bailout program, the Troubled Asset Relief Program. Ally Bank, which is 37% owned by Treasury also announced this morning that it will hold an IPO in order to further reduce the taxpayer ownership of the bank.
The five banks are Community First, Freeport Bancshares, Great River Holding Company, Marine Bank & Trust Company, and Patriot Bancshares.
The Ally IPO will unload 95 million shares of the 177.3 million Treasury currently owns, and the shares' price range is between $25 and $28. Ally will trade on the New York Stock Exchange with the ticker ALLY. The bank got a $17.2 billion investment from Treasury during the financial crisis and the Treasury has gotten back just over $15 billion so far. Overall, Treasury's Ally offering could raise around $3 billion, thus letting Treasury post a slight profit on its investment.
Ally was the banking subsidiary of General Motors and helped finance car purchases but ended up taking massive losses on subprime mortgages. In December, the car company sold the last of its stake in the bank.
Treasury has periodically sold off its stake in some of the smaller banks that received bailout money in an effort to collect what money it can instead of waiting for the banks to buy back the Treasury's investment. The largest banks that received TARP funds have already bought back the Treasury's stakes. So far, the Treasury still has a stake in 71 banks and has received $273 billion from the $245 billion it invested in banks as part of the TARP program. The auction for the remaining shares of the five banks is scheduled for April 3.
“They need to take aggressive action to show they’re not the old Citigroup.”
A man walks past a Citibank branch in lower Manhattan, New York October 16, 2012.
Carlo Allegri / Reuters / Reuters
The stock of the oft-troubled megabank Citigroup is down more than 5% today following news yesterday that the Federal Reserve denied its request to increase its stock buyback to $6.4 billion and increase its quarterly dividend to five cents a share from its current $1.2 billion and penny levels.
The reason the rejection is weighing so heavily on its stock is because Citi management has been holding out hope for the increase. Going into the Federal Reserve's stress tests, which evaluate how a bank could withstand an economic crisis on the scale of what happened in 2008, Citi appeared to be well positioned to pass and increase its capital return to shareholders, which lagged well behind its peers like Wells Fargo and JPMorgan Chase.
"It is five years after the financial crisis and Citi still doesn't have its act together," said CLSA analyst Mike Mayo.
Even more damning for Citi's management and relationship with regulators is that on the quantitative aspects of the test, Citi did the best among its peers. The bank really has been prudently building up its capital base, relying less on borrowing to fund its activities and more on retained earnings — which is bolstered by not paying out huge dividends and buybacks — and its equity.
Compared to JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo, the Fed said Citi would have the highest capital ratio in its most extreme scenario for an economic downturn, with a 6.5% tier one common ratio compared to Bank of America's 5.3%, JPMorgan's 5.5%, and Wells Fargo's 6.1%. This ratio measures how much a bank funds itself with equity compared to borrowing, and the results show that Citi would be the healthiest of its peers in another financial crisis.
Citi also had the highest capital ratio, with a tier one common ratio of 12.7% compared to JPMorgan's 10.5%, Bank of America's 11.1%, and Wells Fargo's 10.6%.
Taken together, this makes the Fed's rejection of Citi's rather modest request basically an indictment of its leadership. Mayo said in a note that the Fed's decision was a "shocker" and that Citi should think about breaking itself up and focus on "enhancing governance and holding managers more accountable."
"The Fed's decision makes it look like there is no level of capital that is sufficient whereby Citi could repurchase stock," Mayo wrote. "We believe it is time for management, including the Chairman, to indicate how Citi today will be much better than Citi in the past and take commensurate actions."
Mayo lowered his price target for Citi to $58 from $60 and said in an interview that, "Someone at Citi needs to be held accountable and to me that's the CFO [John Gerspach]."
Citi's new leadership was brought in a year and a half ago with the promise of improving the bank's relationship with regulators. The old regime, lead by former CEO Vikram Pandit and his president and chief operating office John Havens, was particularly faulted for not getting permission from the Federal Reserve to increase dividends and buybacks in 2012. The Wall Street Journal reported that "Pandit led the board to believe he had a close relationship with regulators" and that the board was "upset over Mr. Pandit's failure to anticipate the Fed's rejection of a plan to buy back shares."
The company's new management has been clear about its need to convince the Fed, with CEO Mike Corbat specifically stressing on its third quarter conference call that it must get the "qualitative" aspect of the capital return process right. "We laid out that we wanted to get the right result in terms of last year's submission. I think we got that and I think importantly, it just wasn't the quantitative piece, it was the qualitative piece," Corbat said.
Nomura analyst Steven Chubak said in a note today that the issues the Fed detailed could be fixed quickly, but that "Citi's relationship with regulators (CEO Corbat was widely perceived to have good rapport with the Fed) may take longer to mend."
In explaining its decision to reject Citi, the Fed said that the bank had "a number of deficiencies in its capital planning practices" and that Citi had difficulties projecting "revenue and losses under a stressful scenario for material parts of the firm's global operations."
One analyst, Gerard Cassidy at RBC Capital Markets, speculated that the Fed's rejection was at least partially tied to Citi's recent massive earnings restatement following its Mexican unit Banamex allegedly getting defrauded out of $400 million by oil services company Oceangrafia, which Corbat described as a "despicable crime." Citi had to restate its 2013 earnings by $235 million as a result. In a research note, Cassidy said, "We believe that the failure was driven from a qualitative perspective with the recent Mexico fraud investigation."
If that's the case, then one of Citi's putative strengths, its business and consumer lending across the world and especially Latin America, might be a weakness in the eyes of its most important regulator, the Federal Reserve. Some 39% of its $76 billion in revenue in 2013 came from overseas and 68% of its $13.7 billion in profits.
This March at an investor conference, chief financial officer John Gerspach said, "Our goal is to increase the amount of capital that we return to shareholders over time," and that the bank's ability to hit its projected 10% return on tangible common equity, a widely watched measure of bank performance, "requires increasing the amount of capital returned to our shareholders in the coming years, subject to regulatory approval."
Those plans are on hold for at least a year, and Citi was only at 8.2% return in 2013. "It's not dead, it's delayed," Mayo said, referring to Citi's increased buyback plans.
Analysts at KBW downgraded Citi to its equivalent of a neutral rating following the Federal Reserve's decision. "We believed that the restructuring would support increased capital return in 2014 (and beyond)," said KBW analysts Frederick Cannon in a note. "However, restructuring has been slow to progress, in our view, and now Citi is faced with the possibility of lower capital return."
But Citi can always up its capital return later — the money hasn't gone anywhere — but Mayo thinks the bank's management needs to make a statement that its forcefully addressing the problems the Fed has identified. "They need to take aggressive action to show they're not the old Citigroup."
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Japan’s Fast Retailing talks a big game, but Uniqlo has been struggling to make a splash in America since 2005, and time is running out to get to its big goal.
Uniqlo has grabbed headlines this month amid reports the Japanese clothing company's owner, Fast Retailing, might buy J.Crew — talks that ultimately fell apart. Nearly every story has included comments from CEO Tadashi Yanai proclaiming, as he has for years and years, that his company will one day be the biggest clothier in the U.S. and the world.
But almost a decade after Yanai started his foray into the U.S., Uniqlo appears as if it's going to fall short of its lofty ambitions.
Yanai, Japan's richest man, started talking in 2012 about how Uniqlo, not just Fast Retailing, plans to reach $10 billion in U.S. annual sales by 2020. The market is integral to his hope for $50 billion in global sales at that point, a leap from Fast Retailing's current $11 billion. While Uniqlo has since earned devoted fans from New York to San Francisco for its colorful, well-made, affordable basics, it's challenging to see how a chain that currently operates just 17 American stores and a website will get to that number in less than six years.
Let's take a look at that goal in context. The Gap and Old Navy chains posted about $9.5 billion in U.S. sales for the year through Feb. 1, across nearly 2,000 full-price and outlet stores and its websites. H&M, also pursuing a rapid expansion in the U.S., reported just over $2 billion in sales last year through 305 stores in America and an online operation that launched in August. (Uniqlo declined to comment for this story through an external spokesperson, though said it stands by Yanai's 2020 ambitions.)
Satya Nadella revealed Office for tablets and smartphones at an event in San Francisco today. It’s something that former CEO Steve Ballmer refused to do while for more than a decade.
BuzzFeed/Matthew Lynley
Today, at a small event in San Francisco, Microsoft made attempt to enter an already busy technology news cycle by introducing Office for the iPad and other mobile devices.
To be sure, it's a piece of software that is seemingly years overdue, and the giant was expected at some point to cave into pressure from its customers — whose rapidly growing arsenal of devices has gone beyond Windows-powered devices. But even beyond the software, and perhaps more importantly, new CEO Satya Nadella signaled what is essentially a sea change at the company that tethered its prized enterprise software to Windows for more than a decade.
"The number one job is to empower people to be productive, and do more across all devices," Nadella said. Key word: all devices — not just devices powered by Windows. He later added, "There is no trade-off, it's reality for us... What motivates us is the realities of our customers."
When asked directly by BuzzFeed following the presentation why Nadella felt today was a good time, rather than any time in the iPad's four years of existence, he essentially reiterated that Microsoft felt "this was the right time... we got it, and we're excited for feedback from the community."
The gesture is also a surprising olive branch to the developer community, which has been tethered to Windows along with Office for any sort of connected applications while the iPhone, iPad and Android devices completely took over the marketplace. Nadella even pointed this out in his presentation, saying "The key salient point is, the most important developer API we have is office 365."
It's fair to say that — given how long it has taken — this is an event that likely would not have happened with former CEO and salesperson extraordinaire Steve Ballmer in charge. Nadella is an engineer to his core — as evidenced by a few attempts at cracking computer science-related jokes — and his focus is on Microsoft's products. That, inevitably, could end up shipping fewer copies of Windows, though he said the company is still committed to Windows.
And yet, with Ballmer out of the picture, Microsoft's stock has actually gone on a huge run, breaking the $40 barrier — a high point for more than a decade — earlier this month.
It's becoming increasingly clear that there is a new vision and new life within the decades-old company. Now the question remains as to whether this move will spell out the triumphant return or continued decay of Microsoft's Windows and PC empire.
Forget Yale: Coursera’s new CEO sees “tremendous potential” in the world’s biggest country.
Richard Levin, Coursera's new CEO, speaks at 2013 World Economic Forum on "China's Growth Context - Unleashing Entrepreneurial Innovation."
swiss-image.ch Monika Flueckiger / Via Flickr: worldeconomicforum
When online education platform Coursera announced Monday that it had snagged the former president of Yale University, Richard Levin, as its new CEO, the play seemed obvious: an ambitious startup that has attracted its fair share of skeptics was buying credibility from one of the world's most prestigious universities.
But Levin also brought another card to Coursera, a leading provider of massively-open online courses, or MOOCs: he has deep connections to China, including the Chinese government, and years of experience leading expansion into Asian markets. At Yale, Levin led a partnership with Peking University, served on the board of the nonprofit National Committee on United States-China relations, as well as overseeing the university's controversial partnership to open a campus in Singapore.
Less than a week into his tenure as Coursera's CEO, Levin is already touting the "tremendous potential" for his company in China. In an interview with BuzzFeed, he called it "inevitable" that China will become the company's largest market. (It is currently third, behind the United States and India.)
"It's a highly literate population, but only a fraction still have access to higher education," Levin said.
Levin also cited his connections with the notoriously difficult Chinese government as an asset to Coursera. "It will help that I've worked quite a lot with the Chinese administration," he told BuzzFeed.
Attempts to move higher education online have been around for more than a decade, but MOOCs (the term was coined in 2008) — whose content range from video lectures to webbier and more interactive forms — have been on a roller-coaster ride since the moment in 2012 when they were widely hailed as the savior of overpriced American higher education. The The New York Times declared 2012 "The Year of the MOOC," heralding the platform's potential to split open the world of higher education by allowing students access to online courses taught by professors at prestigious universities like Harvard, Yale and MIT.
Then, in 2013, a series of troubling statistics brought MOOCs plummeting back down. As it turned out, according to a study released by the University of Pennsylvania, only about 4 percent of people who signed up for Coursera's classes competed them (although the number jumps much higher when you consider only those who make an effort to complete the first assignment). Most of their users were also relatively well-educated, male and wealthy.
The entrepreneur Sebastian Thrun, who founded Udacity, claimed in 2012 that the MOOC model would disrupt higher education to the point of leaving just ten institutions of higher education standing.
That rhetoric has mostly faded: in the wake of a study finding that students learned much better with in-person courses than his offerings, Thrun later announced that many of Udacity's courses were "lousy" and that his company would be transitioning to a corporate-training model in place of traditional higher-ed offerings.
Levin's hiring is just one signal that MOOC providers are catching on to the fact that online courses have a particular attraction in countries like China and India — one that may not be as desirable in the United States, where in-person education and solid credentials are more readily available. And several of Coursera's current partners--which include prestigious US universities like Stanford, Yale, and Princeton--have names that hold even more weight in Asian countries than in the United States
Coursera and Levin are not the only MOOC providers who have been thinking increasingly globally, especially when it comes to China and India. Their main competitor, edX, a nonprofit joint venture between Harvard and MIT, opened their platform in October to Chinese giant Tsingshua University. The venture, called XuetangX, is now China's largest online learning portal.
Both organizations have been furiously translating their course offerings through a variety of mediums, as well as seeking out partnerships with Chinese universities. Tsingshua and Peking University both host courses on Coursera's platform, along with more than 100 other partner universities. EdX even formed a new partnership with the queen of Jordan, Rania Al Abdullah, to create "MOOCs for the Arab world."
Anant Agarwal, the founder of edX, said students in China, India and elsewhere in the developing world are "stuck between a rock and a hard place," with limited access to education but facing a demand for skills from US-based and other employers.
"There's a huge untapped desire for high-quality courses," Agarwal said.
The companies have yet to turn the new markets into booming businesses. So far Coursera, Udacity and edX all have just one main source of revenue: charging students for a subset of their offerings, especially certificates that verify they have taken the class. All three providers say that so far, there's much less demand for those certificates internationally, largely because of lack of funding.
But Coursera has made it clear that right now, they're concerned with growth, not money. They've been offering fee waivers students who want verified certificates that can't pay, and demand has been high in the developing world. Yin Lu, their director of growth, says Coursera has approved every fee waiver application they've received.
"The model we're pursuing right now is scale and expansion," says Levin.
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Ken Lewis will pay a $10 million fine in a settlement, ending a suit where he was accused of failing to disclose risks to shareholders in Bank of America’s acquisition of the investment bank Merrill Lynch.
Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images
One of the costliest acquisitons in banking history has claimed another victim, the man who masterminded it. The New York Attorney General announced Wednesday that it had reached a settlement with Ken Lewis, the former CEO of Bank of America, that would ban him from serving as an officer or a director of a public company for three years along with a $10 million fine.
The fine, which also includes a $15 million penalty against Bank of America, brings to an end an investigation started by then-Attorney General Andrew Cuomo that began after Bank of America's 2008 acquisition of Merrill Lynch. The deal was originally worth $50 billion when it was announced on September 15, 2008, but the time it closed on January 1 of the next year, Merrill Lynch was only worth $19 billion. The bank had failed to disclose to shareholders that Merrill Lynch had a $15.31 billion loss in the fourth quarter of 2008. Lewis resigned from the bank at the end of 2009.
While Lewis did not admit or deny the charges, the Attorney General's office said the fine and ban was "one of the first successful attempts by law enforcement to hold accountable a CEO or individual at a major institution since the financial crisis."
Lewis left the bank in 2009, while the bank settled an investor suit for $2.43 billion in 2012 over claims that it mislead its shareholders about the financial health of Merrill Lynch, it also settled with the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2010 for $150 million over failing to disclose information about Merrill Lynch.
"Today's settlement demonstrates a major victory in our continued commitment to applying the law equally to individuals, as well as corporations," Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said in a statement.
Joe Price, Bank of America's chief financial officer who was also sued by Cuomo, was not part of the settlement.
While Lewis is banned from serving as an officer or a director, it's unlikely the decision will much affect his plans. Lewis is 66 and hasn't had a job since his departure from Bank of America.
Bank of America also reached a $9.5 billion settlement with the Federal Housing Finance Agency, the regulator that oversees the government-backed mortgage companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac over mortgage-backed securities Bank of America, Merilll Lynch, and Countrywide (which Bank of America acquired in 2008) sold to the companies between 2005 and 2007.
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This is the second time the troubled megabank has failed the Fed’s dividend and buyback process.
Brendan Mcdermid / Reuters / Reuters
The Federal Reserve has given Citi, America's third largest banks by assets, a significant black eye by rejecting its plans to return capital to shareholders in the form of dividend and buybacks. The bank had a $1.2 billion buyback program and a dividend of a penny per share in 2013.
Citi said in a statement that it had asked permission for $6.4 billion in buybacks through the first quarter of 2015 and a quarterly dividend of five cents per share. The Fed instead allowed it to continue its current buyback and dividend plans.
In after-hours trading, Citi's stock is down more than 5% to $47.45.
The Fed said that it rejected Citi's plans for qualitative reasons, namely that the bank's plan "reflected a number of deficiencies in its capital planning practices." It also added that its decision to reject reflects the higher standards it applies to the biggest banks. The central bank said that large banks like Citi, whose failure would potentially drag down the entire economy or require a massive bailout, have "significantly heightened supervisory expectations," when it comes to winning approval for buybacks and dividends.
Specifically, the Fed criticized Citi's "ability to project revenue" in a scenario where the economy suffered a significant downturn, or to estimate how "its full range of business activities and exposures" would be affected by a stressed financial environment.
"We will continue to work closely with the Fed to better understand their
concerns so that we can bring our capital planning process in line with their expectations and meet their standards on a qualitative basis as well," Citi CEO Michael Corbat said in a statement. "We clearly are being challenged to meet the highest standards in the CCAR process."
The Fed's judgement is a damning one that provides another piece of evidence for ciritics of Citi who say that its far-flung divisions, from credit cards, to investment banking, to corporate lending all over the world, are too much for any management team.
This isn't the first time Citi has failed the Fed's capital return approval process, known as CCAR. Two years ago, the bank's plans were rejected by the Fed. The embarrassment reportedly helped lead to then CEO Vikram Pandit's 2012 ouster. Some board members felt that he wasn't able to form a good relationship with the bank's regulators.
Four other banks had their capital return plans rejected by the Federal Reserve: the American branches of HSBC, RBS, and Santader, along with Zions, the Utah-based bank that was the sole bank to fail the Federal Reserve's stress tests released last week.
"With each year we have seen broad improvement in the industry's ability to assess its capital needs under stress and continuing improvements to the risk-measurement and -management practices that support good capital planning," Federal Reserve governor Daniel Tarullo said in a statement. "However, both the firms and supervisors have more work to do as we continue to raise expectations for the quality of risk management in the nation's largest banks."
