Small Print

Mr. Dirty-Clean

Events Analyst Marge Schwietering, frankly, must have had a lot of fun putting these together from a couple of days ago. We thought these would be easy winners of the Quotation of the Week Competition, well, they are, actually, but Rex Tillerson raced in with a very close second, of a very different character.

“Done … for you big boy,” read a message sent by a Barclays banker to one of the lender’s traders, who had asked him to fix a key lending rate artificially low.

“Dude, I owe you big time! Come over one day after work and I’m opening a bottle of Bollinger,” a trader from another firm emailed a banker at Barclays, showing his thanks for the rate set artificially low.

“This is the way you pull off deals like this chicken, don’t talk about it too much, 2 months of preparation… the trick is you do not do this alone … this is between you and me but really don’t tell ANYBODY,” a Barclays trader told a trader at another bank.

Months later, a senior Barclays treasury manager called the British Bankers’ Association and warned them that rates were not accurate, but that Barclays was not the worst offender.

“We’re clean, but we’re dirty clean, rather than clean-clean,” he said.

“No one’s clean-clean,” the BBA representative responded.

You know what, I’m sorry, but that’s what you get when you employ teenagers in positions of responsibility, dude.

More sunscreen and houseboats and we’ll be fine, stop fussing….

Events Team Leader Mark Magee comes in at a very close second with this runner up in the Quotation of the Week Competition.

ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson says fears about climate change, drilling, and energy dependence are overblown.

Tillerson blamed a public that is “illiterate” in science and math, a “lazy” press, and advocacy groups that “manufacture fear” for energy misconceptions in a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations.

“We have spent our entire existence adapting. We’ll adapt,” he said. “It’s an engineering problem and there will be an engineering solution.”

These appeared in The Guardian, but went viral. I heard them on NPR and nearly choked on my tea and toast. When it comes to being patronizing, I guess it’s hard to beat the CEO of the largest oil company in the world, but why, oh, why, should he think that, with the job he’s in, anyone would take anything he had to say on the subject seriously? That would make us illiterate and lazy.

On the other hand, it’s nice to hear that there are still people out there who believe the one percenters. That’s not the normal one percent, that’s the one percent of the scientific community that does not believe in global climate change. Actually, you know what, it’s probably less than that. Maybe 0.000001 percent. But I want to be careful here, I don’t want to give the impression that I’m illiterate in math(s).

Math(s) is not an exact science

Talking of being illiterate in math(s), Compensation Analyst Manager Scott Patterson found this glaring example of 0/10 in addition in Triumph Group’s 2012 proxy statement.

You know, we’ve seen stuff like this before. It happens more frequently than you’d imagine. We’ve published whole reports on it. But usually it’s off by a few dollars, rarely more, and usually not the entire table. Here, however, they’ve gone the whole hog, even adding up the same amounts incorrectly in several different ways. This is the finest example of its kind I’ve ever seen, and represents imagination rather than calculation at work. Dude, d’you think they missed a column out?

Not so much a search, as a glance around the boardroom

Events Analyst Dovid Muyderman – this was a democratic week for Small Print – found this in a Brink’s Company 8-K from June 18^th.

On June 15, 2012, the Board of Directors (the “Board”) of The Brink’s Company (the “Company”)(BCO), upon the recommendation of the search committee of directors formed in November 2011 to identify a permanent President and Chief Executive Officer (the “Search Committee”), appointed Thomas C. Schievelbein, age 58, as the Company’s Chairman of the Board of Directors (“Chairman”), President and Chief Executive Officer.  Mr. Schievelbein had served as the interim President and Chief Executive Officer of the Company since December 2011, prior to which he served as the interim Executive Chairman of the Company from November 2011 to December 2011.  The Search Committee was assisted in the search by a nationally recognized executive recruiting firm.

That has got to be the easiest gig this nationally-recognized (yes, it should be hyphenated) executive recruiting firm ever, ever had. I wonder how many hours they racked up for it, how many fantasy candidates they threw in there before coming to the conclusion that was, literally, staring them in the face. Money well spent? Not, dude.