Saturday, November 10, 2007

Bandar's Bitch


One of my new adult qualities is my ability to talk about fashion, celebrity gossip and now, financial services. A couple of days ago I wrote how fucked up Citi is and about Chuck Prince's resignation. Now, that I'm in the world of beauty, I feel freer to write about the crazy state of the bank.

When I was at Citi, I was ready to propose a credit car incentive program where customers could redeem points to donate money to their favorite environmental cause. Management told me I had to be very careful about the "cause" aspect because of Saudi Prince Alwaleed who owns part of Citi. For example, if the cause was environmental, Alwaleed could get word of it and get pissed off because he's Saudi and has ties to oil and oil hurts the environment and my program would just be one big mess of corporate hypocrisy. I could never remember Alwaleed's name so I just called him Prince Bandar and the project became known as "Project Bandar." In any case, after reading this interview with Prince Bandar aka Alwaleed, I realized that Prince was Bandar's bitch. In any case, Project Bandar never even made it through one round of paper passing and any profit the bank makes in the future will continue to make the Prince richer.

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