Word: citibankers
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...Corporation first moved to retract this concession after being forced to divest $50 million in Citibank debt securities following the announcement of the bank's participation in a consortium loan to South Africa in September 1980. Much to the Corporation's dismay, Harvard's commendable action received unexpectedly widespread press coverage and proved highly embarrassing to Citibank and the South African regime. Soon after, Citibank dispatched a representative to consult with the Corporation and lobby University officials to relax their present policy. The Corporation responded by applying pressure on the ACSR to approve the repeal of the 1978 concession...
...investment policy. Then, almost as a casual afterthought, he asked the ACSR to rectify a "minor flaw" in the University's current bank policy which would force it to divest from banks trying to make "good loans" to the South African government. He gave as an example the Citibank loan which he claimed South African Blacks actually solicited...
...guise of a minor modification, and without the benefit of a detailed discussion either within the ACSR or among the Harvard community as a whole. The proposed alteration was not a minor technical matter but the effective abrogation of the University's South African policy. Second, the Citibank loan was not solicited by South African Blacks. The Wall Street Journal of Sept. 26. 1980 quotes South African Finance Minister Owen Horwood, who was exultant over the case with which his government obtained a major loan designed to test its "creditworthiness" on the international money market...
...Corporation not only rehabilitated the theoretical possibility of a "good loan" to the South African government, but interpreted the term in its broadest possible sense. Over half the money of the Citibank loan went directly to finance "whitening" projects--the forced eviction and relocation of Blacks and coloureds living in or around white residential areas. The remainder would go to finance a few strtictly segregated hospitals and schools. These latter projects can do little to alleviate the catastrophic conditions in which apartheid has placed millions of Blacks. The Black infant mortality rate is six times greater than that for whites...
...Corporation's formal reform proposal contains a postscript noting that under the new guidelines, the Citibank loan would probably not be considered humanitarian. It should be emphasized that a sub-committee of the ACSR and not the Corporation reached this conclusion was directly contradicted by Corporation member Hugh Calkins '45 both in his much publicized letter to the ACSR where he claimed the Citibank loan served a "worthy purpose," and in a recent Harvard Crimsoninterview where he invoked the opinion of "some" Blacks to justify the loan. If the Corporation dares to mention the Citibank loan in the same breath...