Eric Dash reports that investors in Vikram Pandit’s Old Lane funds redeemed "substantially all" of their funds when they were given the opportunity in late March. Old Lane, which had $4.5 billion in funds under management last year, is now down to just $1.5 billion – and that money belongs to Citigroup, Pandit, and other Old Lane principals.
And yet the $800 million that Citi paid for the firm has been written down by just 25%, which doesn’t sound very realistic to me. Old Lane was a duff investment, and Pandit should be extremely embarrassed by its performance. Any other executive who presided over such an atrociously-performing business line would have been fired; Pandit, astonishingly, got promoted to CEO of the whole shebang. I don’t doubt that he might do better at Citigroup than he did at Old Lane – after all, he can hardly do much worse. But his public statements on the subject of Old Lane, when he’s finally forced to make them, are going to be extremely interesting.