Another Effective Manager Has Burned Out on the Job. *Rajat Kumar Gupta is a member of the board of directors of investment bank Goldman Sachs, a former managing director at McKinsey, an independent director at Sberbank, and a member of the international board of trustees of the Skolkovo School. According to the WSJ, in 2008 Gupta may have shared insider information with Galleon hedge fund founder Raj Rajaratnam, who was arrested in October 2009. The newspaper learned this from court materials sent to Rajaratnam’s lawyer. *There hasn’t been a trial yet, so let’s not start throwing banana peels at citizen Gupta ahead of time. Still, I should note that it’s going to be reeaaaaaaally hard now for our own German Gref to explain Gupta’s gigantic fee at Sberbank. He was getting an order of magnitude more than the other independent directors, and no one could explain why. When asked repeatedly about it, Sber employees would fly into righteous fury and repeat Gref’s explanation word for word: *- He’s just that impressive. You’re simply not worthy of uttering his name. When we say, "Gupta is on Sber’s board," everyone trembles, and the market capitalization goes up by three percent. When we say Gupta, we mean "top-tier investment quality"; when we say "top-tier investment quality," we mean Gupta. * Though really, everyone understood that Gupta was simply a whim of Sber’s president, who fussed over him like a man carrying a precious icon. They shoved him into Skolkovo too, and everywhere else. A very crafty ceremonial figurehead on a very large salary.
So now it turns out that “top-tier investment quality” means sprinting to the phone and leaking information about a deal. As I understand it, Bob Gupta has been nominated again as a candidate for the supervisory board. The upcoming shareholders’ meeting should be very interesting. And, treacherously enough, they scheduled it for June 4. Not only is that my birthday, but VTB’s shareholders’ meeting is on the same day. So here I am, scratching my head like the monkey in the old joke: what am I supposed to do now, split myself in two?
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