Word: abbouds
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...colleagues at the bank, he was unquestionably a whiz at finance, but around the office he seemed to some more like a human buzz saw-pugnacious, cutting, even on occasion rude. Yet apparently the very qualities that wound up costing A. Robert Abboud, 51, his post in April as the $265,000-a-year chairman of First Chicago Corp., the nation's ninth largest bank holding company, have landed him another top job at nearly twice his old salary. His new employer: Los Angeles-based Occidental Petroleum Corp., the nation's twelfth largest oil company...
Occidental's aged, autocratic chairman, Armand Hammer, 82, shoved aside the president he had installed only last year, Hungarian-born Zoltan Merszei, 57, an effective but sometimes abrasive former chairman of the Dow Chemical Co., and replaced him with Abboud. The ex-banker thus became the fifth man tapped for the Oxy-Pete presidency in the past decade by Hammer, who after 23 years at Occidental shows no signs of wanting to yield real authority to any possible successor. Said Hammer of his latest No. 2: "He's a brilliant banker and a smart businessman...
Your tale of two troubled banks [May 12] does a great injustice to two remarkable men: Robert Abboud and Harvey Kapnick. To characterize their association as "Frankenstein's monster meeting Dracula" is inaccurate and unjust...
Those driving personal habits, however, created problems in the staid banking community. Abboud became infamous for his humiliating chastisements of senior officials in front of their subordinates, and FORTUNE this spring named him one of the ten toughest bosses in the U.S. Some 200 bank executives left First Chicago during Abboud's tenure. One described him as "perverse, willful, abusive, inconsiderate and erratic." After one disgruntled banker resigned, Abboud said to him: "If you are leaving town, I'd like to buy your house...
...past two years, Abboud moved aggressively to get more clients with fixed-rate loans covered by short-term borrowing. Like many other bankers and economists, he figured that interest rates had peaked. When rates continued up toward 20%, his bank's profits nosedived $14 million in the first quarter. Late last year Abboud brought into the bank Harvey Kapnick, who had left the $499,000-a-year job as chairman of the Arthur Andersen accounting firm after a policy dispute with partners. It was like Frankenstein's monster meeting Dracula. Kapnick had an almost equally truculent style...