WSJ and others (9/17/03)
| Weekends affect the weather, too | |
| Scientists aren’t sure why, but human activity is likely at work | |
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| This color-coded map shows differences between minimum temperatures on the weekends, compared to the working week. Red indicates a higher minimum temperature on the weekend, and blue indicates a lower minimum temperature. The diameter of the circles relates to the magnitude of the difference, and filled circles are significant at 95 percent. |
| WASHINGTON,
Sept. 15 — Life
is different on weekends, a distinction that seems to affect Mother Nature
as well as people. Climate researchers studying records at thousands of
locations have discovered that, in many communities, the temperature range
between the daily high and low changes on the weekend. And, as with some
people, there seems to be a little hangover of this weekend effect on
Mondays. PIERS M. deF. Forster and Susan Solomon of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Aeronomy Laboratory in Boulder, Colo., noticed the weekend effect while studying records in an effort to learn more about global warming. Their findings are published in this week’s online issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. About 35 percent of locations experienced a significant weekend effect over 50 years of recordkeeping, the researchers found. In regions such as the Southwest, the Carolinas and Georgia, Sunday and Monday had a consistently larger daily temperature range than other days, with Fridays being the day with the smallest difference between high and low. In many communities the difference in range between weekend and weekdays was nearly 1 degree Fahrenheit (0.5 degree Celsius). But the weekend effect wasn’t always the same. Many localities in the Midwest had reverse effects, with smaller temperature ranges on the weekend than weekdays. In those regions, Tuesdays and Wednesdays typically had the biggest difference between the daily high and low. “We were surprised, particularly in the Midwest ... because we thought we would find Saturday and Sunday to have a bigger range than weekdays like the East Coast and West Coast, but it was the opposite,” said Forster. “We don’t know what’s going on.” Forster and Solomon found the weekend effect in New Mexico, Arizona, the Midwest and some Eastern states tended to be larger in the summer than winter. “The beauty of this weekend effect is it necessarily has to be of human origin, because we don’t have something in nature that cares whether it’s Tuesday or Saturday,” said Forster, who is also affiliated with the University of Reading in the United Kingdom. Since the change in daily temperature range was mostly a result of nighttime minimums on some days not being as low as on other days, the researchers speculate the cause may relate to materials released into the air that help form clouds. Moisture in the air condenses more readily when it has something to adhere to, such as a tiny bit of dust or a chemical particle. Clear nights are generally cooler than cloudy ones because clouds tend to reduce the amount of radiation lost by the land into space, and observations have shown than adding particles and aerosols into the air — over oceans, for example — can increase cloudiness. LINK TO HUMAN ACTIVITY The researchers concluded the effect must be a result of human activity, an important link for scientists who already had evidence that overall temperatures had increased over the past century or so. So why does the weekend effect reduce the weekend temperature range in some places and increase it in others? The researchers aren’t sure, though they have theories. While pollution and dusty aerosols in some areas provide nuclei for water to condense on to form clouds, in other places there may be soot in the aerosols, which could absorb heat and cause the cloud to burn off — evaporate — during the day, leaving less to warm the night, Forster suggested. Another possibility might be that pollutants that warm the air could cause changes in wind circulation patterns on a weekly basis. Or, the scientists said, there may be a gradual change across the country because of the downwind transport of pollutants from place to place. And, they added, they can’t rule out the possibility there is some other human-related mechanism at work other that pollution aerosols and clouds. |
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| US News and World Report 2004 MBA Rankings |
The WSJ Rating CriteriaRecruiters in The Wall Street Journal/Harris Interactive survey rated each business school on these student and school attributes. Here is the percentage of recruiters who said each attribute is "very important."
|
| Attribute | % Very Important |
| Communication and interpersonal skills | 90% |
| Ability to work well within a team | 87 |
| Analytical and problem-solving skills | 85 |
| Personal ethics and integrity (1) | 84 |
| Quality of past hires | 81 |
| Leadership potential | 75 |
| Fit with the corporate culture | 74 |
| Strategic thinking | 67 |
| Likelihood of recruiting "stars" -- that is, graduates who are very likely to be promoted within the company | 64 |
| Student "chemistry" -- that is, the general like or dislike you have of the students overall | 49 |
| Willingness of students to relocate to the job location you require | 49 |
| Original and visionary thinking | 47 |
| Retention rate of past hires | 37 |
| Content of the core curriculum | 35 |
| Overall value for the money invested in the recruiting effort | 34 |
| Students' average number of years of work experience | 34 |
| General management point of view | 32 |
| School "chemistry" -- that is, the general like or dislike you have of the school overall | 32 |
| Entrepreneurial skills | 27 |
| Career-services office at the school | 26 |
| Past acceptance rate of job offers from students at the school | 26 |
| Faculty expertise | 25 |
| Strong international perspective | 24 |
| Awareness of corporate-citizenship issues such as social and environmental responsibility | 18 |
| Overall satisfaction with the school in terms of meeting your M.B.A. recruiting needs | N.A. (2) |
| Likelihood of returning to school for future recruiting needs | N.A. (2) |
TEXARKANA, Ark. -- Three of the nation's four biggest accounting firms have been accused in a lawsuit of fraudulently overbilling clients by hundreds of millions of dollars for travel-related expenses, and the Justice Department has been conducting an investigation of the billing practices of at least one of the firms, PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP.
Documents describing the government's investigation are contained in the previously unpublicized lawsuit filed here in October 2001 that could pose both a public-relations embarrassment and a big legal challenge to the firms. The industry has been under intense scrutiny for its audit work following the 2001 collapse of Enron Corp., which brought down another big accounting firm, Arthur Andersen LLP, and for its perceived lack of oversight at other companies, including Tyco International Ltd., Xerox Corp. and others.
The suit, pending in an Arkansas state circuit court, accuses PricewaterhouseCoopers, KPMG LLP and Ernst & Young LLP of padding the travel-related expenses they billed thousands of clients over a 10-year period dating back to 1991.
The suit alleges that the firms systematically billed their clients for the full face amount of certain travel expenses, including airline tickets, hotel rooms and car-rental expenses, while pocketing undisclosed rebates and volume discounts they received under contracts with various airline, car-rental, lodging and other companies. At times, the rebates retained by the various firms were for up to 40% of the purchase price of travel-related services, the suit has alleged, citing internal firm documents filed with the court.
The lawsuit shines a light on how some professional-services firms, including law firms and medical practices, in recent years have turned reimbursable out-of-pocket expenses, such as bills for travel and meals, into profit centers, which itself isn't illegal or improper. As big accounting, law and other firms have grown over the past decade, they increasingly have used their size in negotiations with travel companies, credit-card companies and others to secure significant rebates of upfront costs. Such rebates don't generate disputes between firms and their clients when fully disclosed. But any that aren't fully disclosed, as alleged in the Texarkana suit, could open firms up to potential liability.
The suit, filed by closely held Warmack-Muskogee Limited Partnership, a shopping-mall operator, also accuses the accounting firms of colluding with each other to secure favorable deals with various travel vendors. It also alleges the firms operated under an agreement not to disclose the existence of the rebates to clients or credit clients fully for the rebates.
The defendants in the suit, all of which deny the lawsuit's allegations, have filed motions seeking to dismiss the case as groundless and to defeat requests that the lawsuit be certified as a class action, the class for which could include a majority of the nation's publicly held corporations. Still, the lawsuit, for which no trial date has been set, already has proved costly to the firms. In an affidavit last month, a PricewaterhouseCoopers partner estimated the firm's partners and staff had spent 125,000 hours, valued at $10.3 million at the firm's billing rates, gathering and analyzing information to be produced for discovery. KPMG in a July court filing estimated that its discovery expenses could approach $26 million.
"The claim that anyone was defrauded is false," said David Nestor, a PricewaterhouseCoopers spokesman. "Clients have substantially benefited from PwC's travel program throughout the period," enjoying lower rates in general as a result of PricewaterhouseCoopers's negotiating clout with vendors. Further, he added, "the allegations of conspiracy are totally incorrect."
Terminology varied widely among the firms' various billing agreements, court records show. Many state that firms were entitled to bill for "out-of-pocket expenses" related to travel, while others use terms such as "expenses," "reasonable expenses," or don't use the term "expense" at all.
The Justice Department investigation of PricewaterhouseCoopers, which focuses on services the firm provided to the federal government, stems from a separate lawsuit filed under seal in 2001 in a California federal district court by Neal A. Roberts, a former PricewaterhouseCoopers consulting partner in Los Angeles. Mr. Roberts's attorney in the federal whistleblower lawsuit, filed under the False Claims Act, is among the lead attorneys representing the plaintiff in the Texarkana case. References to the documents and information gathered by Mr. Roberts are scattered throughout the court records in the Arkansas case, including references to transcripts of tape recordings by federal investigators of telephone conversations Mr. Roberts had with PricewaterhouseCoopers management regarding travel rebates.
According to a May 6 order by the judge in the Texarkana case, documents collected by Mr. Roberts "show that many PwC partners questioned the practice of obtaining rebates without the knowledge of the client and had discussed this within the corporate structure, including the office of in-house counsel." Most of the evidentiary documents filed in the Texarkana case remain under seal at the urging of the accounting firms, which claim that disclosure would be damaging to their businesses and competitive positions.
The court record doesn't indicate whether the Justice Department's investigation is focusing on firms besides PricewaterhouseCoopers. Under the False Claims Act, private litigants file their complaints under seal seeking to collect damages on behalf of the federal government, which then has the option to intervene as a plaintiff in such cases following its own independent investigation.
According to an October 2001 e-mail sent by a PricewaterhouseCoopers attorney to the firm's top partners, the Justice Department first served the firm with a subpoena that same month. The subpoena, according to the e-mail filed with the Texarkana court, sought "extremely broad categories of documents from PwC and its legacy firms, concerning our policies and practices with respect to establishing, charging and billing for travel expenses, and specifically in connection with United States Government contracts from 1991 to present." The e-mail also cited the Texarkana case filed that same month and ordered firm personnel to retain all related documents.
According to documents in the Texarkana court case, PricewaterhouseCoopers Chief Executive Dennis Nally dispatched an e-mail in December 2001 to all U.S. partners offering an explanation of the firm's position in the case and talking points for partners in the event clients asked about the matter. Mr. Nally wrote that the firm does receive preferential pricing from travel vendors, including "an up-front discount" and "a back-end rebate." He said that "our significant buying power results in our clients paying substantially less for travel than they otherwise would."
Mr. Nally wrote that the firm's back-end rebates were "used to defray non-recoverable costs such as the cost of maintaining an in-house travel department, commissions to external travel booking agencies, indirect costs of administering the travel program and other general and administrative expenses."
PricewaterhouseCoopers said yesterday that it often didn't know how much it was getting in rebates at the time it billed clients. This was because rebates were based on the firm's meeting certain travel targets and were finalized at the end of the year, it said.
Mr. Nestor, the PricewaterhouseCoopers spokesman, said the firm stopped the system of year-end rebates in October 2001, before the Texarkana lawsuit was filed and before the firm learned about the government probe. It then began incorporating any discounts into the price of tickets charged to clients, he said, and now charges clients a flat $25 fee for an airline ticket booked online or $60 if it is booked through an agency. In court records, the plaintiff's attorneys say the firm made the change only after the Texarkana suit was filed.
On the Justice Department investigation, Mr. Nestor said "the government was aware that travel-related rebates existed. The issue is how they were allocated to the overhead of government contracts."
Attorneys for Warmack-Muskogee, the plaintiff in the Texarkana suit, said it would be inappropriate for them to comment on the case publicly. Among the three lead firms representing the plaintiff is the Daingerfield, Texas, law firm Nix, Patterson & Roach LLP, which was among the law firms that secured a $17 billion settlement from tobacco companies on behalf of the state of Texas during the late 1990s.
KPMG, in a statement, said it "remains confident that it acted appropriately at all times and stands by its actions in the operation of its travel program." KPMG said its clients did benefit from up-front volume discounts the firm was able to negotiate and that back-end "incentive payments were not tied to specific travel performed for individual clients but resulted from KPMG management of the entire program, including substantial firm travel." In 2002, KPMG changed its policy so that "100% of travel savings are in the form of front-end discounts" and KPMG now bills clients directly to cover the costs of its travel office and reservation system.
Ernst & Young, in a statement, said "the rebates were applied in part to reduce our administrative costs that otherwise would have been billed to clients." The firm added that it changed its policy in January 2002 and now "bills clients at the face value of the tickets for all client travel, and clients pay a separate surcharge that covers administrative aspects of travel."
Also named in the suit as defendants are former KPMG consulting unit BearingPoint Inc., a publicly traded company since 2001, and Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, which purchased Ernst & Young's consulting practice some years ago.
A BearingPoint spokesman noted that the agreements in dispute "were not negotiated by us, but by our former parent," KPMG. BearingPoint said it now "negotiates for the best rates it can obtain" and clients "get the benefit of discounts and incentives provided by these vendors." The company said it doesn't expect the lawsuit to have a material impact on earnings.
A spokesman for Cap Gemini Ernst & Young couldn't be reached.
New York -- THE NATIONAL Association of Securities Dealers charged securities firm Morgan Stanley and one of its top executives with improperly rewarding the firm's brokers with tickets to concerts, sporting events and other noncash incentives valued at more than $1 million in an effort to boost Morgan Stanley's sales of in-house mutual funds and variable annuities.
Morgan Stanley and Bruce Alonso, a managing director at Morgan who oversees the firm's branch network, settled the charges without admitting or denying the allegations. As part of the settlement, Morgan agreed to pay a $2 million fine and Mr. Alonso will pay a $250,000 fine.
The NASD's charges target the heart of Morgan Stanley's system for motivating its brokers to sell the firm's own lines of mutual funds to investors rather than funds run by outside that also are available for sale through its brokers. Sales of proprietary funds, which at Morgan Stanley include Morgan Stanley Funds and Van Kampen Funds, are more profitable to brokerage firms than selling funds run by outside managers. The NASD said that Morgan Stanley employed contests and other incentives in order to meet sales goals for Morgan Stanley-run funds.
"This action points to a culture that put tremendous pressure on its brokers to not let down the rest of the team regardless of whether or not it was in the best interest of investors," said Mary Schapiro, vice chairman of the NASD, which regulates mutual-fund and annuity sales.
Morgan Stanley said it was "pleased to have put this matter behind us," according to spokesman Bret Gallaway. "We recognize that investors must have absolute confidence in the quality of the mutual funds they buy and the integrity of those who provide them and we're committed to that standard."
Regarding Mr. Alonso, who joined what was then the Dean Witter brokerage firm in 1980, Mr. Gallaway said the executive "is a highly valued, longtime member of our management team." Mr. Alonso "agreed to participate in the settlement because it was the best way to ensure a timely resolution that was satisfactory to the NASD and in the best interest of Morgan Stanley," he said.
This isn't the end of probes involving Morgan Stanley's fund-sales practices, however. The firm is still facing a pair of complaints from the Massachusetts Securities Division, one of which alleges that Morgan Stanley misled state investigators about the existence of the sales contests and incentives that were the subject of the NASD charges. In addition, the Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating Morgan's mutual-fund sales practices. Morgan also is facing several lawsuits from shareholders over fund sales.
The firm has said in the past that the lawsuits were without merit and that it was cooperating with the SEC investigation. Morgan Stanley filed a response with Massachusetts regulators yesterday but declined to disclose the contents of the response. The firm wouldn't comment further on the various matters yesterday. Prior to the regulatory scrutiny that its sales practices have drawn in recent months, Morgan Stanley had consistently maintained that the firm maintained a level playing field for brokers to sell internal and external financial products.
NASD rules prohibit contests and other forms of noncash compensation that are intended to boost the sale of specific products. Contests are permitted if they take into account sales of an entire class of product -- such as total sales of mutual funds irrespective of which companies manage the funds.
The NASD said in its complaint that the incentives offered by Morgan to boost the sales of its in-house funds "are the very types of noncash-compensation sales incentives" that the regulator's rules "were designed to prevent." The NASD said the contests and sales incentives "were a by-product of the intense pressure" to meet targets for sales of proprietary funds.
Between October 1999 and December 2002, Morgan Stanley held at least 29 sales contests at the national, regional and branch level, according to the NASD. Among the prizes Morgan Stanley offered its brokers: all-expense-paid trips to resort and golf schools, playoff tickets and Britney Spears concert tickets.
In addition to the contests, the NASD contended that the firm's compensation system for branch and regional managers was part of the effort to increase proprietary fund sales and meet targets for in-house fund sales set by senior management.
In one of these contests-called "Move Your Dial," branch managers in the firm's Southeast region were offered dinners and travel and entertainment allowances for increasing the ratio of proprietary funds sold compared with nonproprietary funds.
Many of the contests were tied to the launch of new Morgan Stanley funds. In June 2002, the NASD said Morgan Stanley conducted a nationwide sales campaign intended to attract $500 million in assets to the Morgan Stanley Small-Mid Special Value Fund. Incentives were created for managers of the top-producing regions, including a dinner hosted by senior management in New York, according to the NASD.
Regional managers, for their part, established sales goals for their branches, the NASD said. For example, the regional manager in the Southeast set a sales target of $75 million for the Small-Mid Special Value Fund, which sought $50,000 in investments from each broker in the region. In turn, a variety of rewards were offered to branch managers for getting their brokers to meet their sales targets. The branch managers would then establish their own contests, according to the regulator.
The NASD also alleged that Morgan Stanley attempted to hide its focus on proprietary funds from the public "to avoid public-relations ramifications." Under this policy, it said Morgan Stanley employees were directed to refrain from discussing the details of these fund contests in writing.
The NASD alleged that until January 2003 Morgan Stanley didn't have a supervisory or compliance systems in place to monitor incentive programs at the firm, even though the current rules governing noncash compensation have been in place since 1999. The NASD noted that at the start of its investigation, a senior official in the Morgan Stanley compliance department, which oversees whether firm activities are in line with regulations, wasn't aware of any mutual-fund sales contests taking place anywhere at the firm. As part of the settlement, the firm agreed to implement new compliance procedures within 60 days.
According to the NASD, the effort to promote the sales of in-house funds was led by Mr. Alonso, who oversees the firm's network of more than 11,000 brokers but doesn't work for the firm's money-management group. Mr. Alonso had "direct knowledge" of at least one of the contests that violated NASD rules, the NASD said.
NEW YORK Attorney General Eliot Spitzer filed the first criminal charges since he began investigating financial markets two years ago, ratcheting up regulatory pressure on Bank of America Corp. and raising new questions about where his current probe of improper mutual-fund trading by hedge funds could lead.
Bank of America has been under scrutiny because of the role its employees played in helping a New Jersey hedge fund allegedly carry out illegal and improper trades.
In a joint action with the Securities and Exchange Commission aimed at answering criticism that his investigations failed to act in concert with securities regulators, Mr. Spitzer charged a former Bank of America broker, Theodore Sihpol III, with grand larceny and securities fraud. The felonies are punishable by as many as 25 years in prison.
The SEC filed accompanying charges of civil securities fraud against Mr. Sihpol for his role in allegedly arranging illegal "late trading" of Bank of America mutual funds by a customer, Canary Capital Partners LLC, and its managing principal, Edward J. Stern. Two weeks ago, without admitting or denying wrongdoing, Mr. Stern paid $40 million to settle civil charges by Mr. Spitzer that he engaged in such trading, which is illegal, as well as in-and-out "timing trades" that violated some mutual-fund groups' policies.
Yesterday, Mr. Spitzer and SEC officials indicated that the charges against Mr. Sihpol could be the first of many in the case. At a news conference at Mr. Spitzer's office along with several SEC staffers, SEC enforcement chief Stephen Cutler said it isn't clear whether the conduct uncovered so far by Mr. Spitzer's probe represents "the tip of the iceberg or the entire iceberg." Mr. Spitzer added, "at a minimum, there are a lot of ice cubes out there."
It isn't clear whether the 36-year-old Mr. Sihpol, who surrendered voluntarily to police yesterday in New York, will cooperate in the probe by providing damaging information about other Bank of America employees, customers or other parties to the mutual-fund trading, according to people familiar with the case. His lawyer, Donald Buchwald, said that while Mr. Spitzer has clearly "identified a significant area of unfairness" in mutual-fund trading tactics, Mr. Sihpol "sought and obtained approval for Canary's trading procedures from all appropriate personnel and levels of the bank." A bank official declined comment.
In a brief appearance before state criminal-court Judge Melissa Jackson in lower Manhattan, Mr. Sihpol was ordered to post bail of $750,000 and surrender his passport. Because of a snafu in submitting payment, he was kept in custody after the court appearance.
Mr. Spitzer's investigation of alleged conflicts of interest in Wall Street research at Merrill Lynch & Co., which began in mid-2001, led to a sweeping industry-wide reform in April 2002, when 10 Wall Street securities firms agreed to pay $1.4 billion and separate research from investment banking. However, Mr. Spitzer never filed any criminal charges in that case, bringing civil charges along with the SEC and other regulators. Merrill and two other firms settled civil securities-fraud charges without admitting or denying wrongdoing.
Although Mr. Spitzer had the power to charge Merrill criminally, such charges can be so damaging to a financial institution that prosecutors are reluctant to bring them in the absence of serious misconduct, legal experts say, and it is unlikely that Bank of America itself would be charged criminally.
Mr. Spitzer's latest complaint cited statements to investigators by Mr. Stern himself; by Andrew Goodwin, a former Canary trader who later founded Goodwin Trading Corp. and who is a key figure in the case; and an Aug. 6 interview of Mr. Sihpol himself by one of Mr. Spitzer's investigators. All three accounts said Mr. Sihpol played a key role in arranging the late trading, which enabled Canary to submit orders for mutual funds as late as 6:30 p.m. at prices set at 4 p.m., thus taking advantage of later market-moving events.
The four-page complaint detailed Mr. Sihpol's role in an alleged effort to disguise the late trades, allowing Canary to create a paper trail suggesting that the orders had been submitted on time instead of late. The complaint said Mr. Stern told investigators that Mr. Sihpol accepted orders to trade shares of the bank's Nations Fund mutual funds, and that Canary routinely engaged in late trading "in concert with" Mr. Sihpol.
Mr. Goodwin said he or another Canary employee sent orders to Mr. Sihpol before 4 p.m., following them up with a prearranged phone call after 4 p.m. telling Mr. Sihpol which of the proposed trades to send through, the complaint said.
Mr. Sihpol himself told the Spitzer investigator who interviewed him that he or another Bank of America employee received Canary's list of proposed mutual-fund trades before 4 p.m. and had the orders time-stamped, but wouldn't submit the orders until he received the phone call after 4 p.m., the complaint said. Then after the second call, the complaint said, Mr. Sihpol would discard records of the trades Canary no longer wanted, and fax the tickets for the orders Canary did want to submit to the bank's mutual-funds processing area. Mr. Stern said Canary submitted "hundreds" of orders this way, either through an electronic-trading platform or manually, the complaint said.
Since the day before the probe was first announced, Bank of America shares have fallen about 2.3%, compared with the 0.7% drop in an index of 24 bank stocks kept by Keefe, Bruyette & Woods Inc. Yesterday, the stock rose 64 cents to $77.64 at 4 p.m. in New York Stock Exchange composite trading.
"Bank of America is cooperating fully with law-enforcement and regulatory-agency inquiries into this matter. We are moving diligently to address any issues within our company in order to maintain the trust of our customers," the bank said in a statement.
Robert Maneri, an analyst at Victory Capital Management Inc. in Cleveland, says Bank of America's problems would be a greater issue if more than just a few people were involved, and if Mr. Spitzer's probe were to reach into the bank's top tier of management.
Mr. Maneri, whose firm owned 3.5 million shares of the stock on June 30, praised Chairman Kenneth Lewis for moving quickly to dismiss six or more employees that knew about the relationship with Canary. "It's the reputation that is more at risk than the earnings," Mr. Maneri said.
So far Mr. Spitzer's investigation has touched at least two senior Bank of America executives.
Robert H. Gordon, head of the bank's mutual funds, was dismissed last week. The head of the entire asset-management business, Richard DeMartini, was sent a January 2002 e-mail about the relationship with Canary, according to exhibits to Mr. Spitzer's Sept. 3 complaint.
Mr. DeMartini remains in charge of the unit that he was hired to oversee in 2001 and has taken over as interim head of Mr. Gordon's old department, Banc of America Capital Management. In an e-mail to his unit on Monday, Mr. DeMartini said, "The past two weeks have been extremely difficult for all of us. Because of the nature of the situation, we can expect the environment to be challenging for some time."
One business unit under scrutiny is the group of bank-employed computer experts that set up a system at Canary's office through which the hedge fund was able to participate in late trading as late as 6:30 p.m., according to the Spitzer complaints. Kevin Browne, the former head of the department that installed the software at Canary, was one of the bank employees dismissed last week. The former official couldn't be reached for comment.
