By IANS,
London : Vikram Pandit, the Indian-born CEO of Citi Bank, has wielded the broom to clean up his banks’ losses and the pruning may affect its forays into the Indian market as well.
Citi is understood to be toying with the idea of selling its one billion pound ($2 billion) stake in Indian bank HDFC, apart from off-loading stakes in various other countries. The American giant has a 12.3 percent stake in the Indian bank, which can raise one billion pounds if sold.
The business world is eagerly awaiting the cuts announcement ever since Pandit’s controversial email to every employee of Citi last week made it to the internet. In the message, he promised that Citi would become “the greatest turnaround story of our age”.
The Times says that over the next few days Citi will begin signing off second-quarter results that are expected to reveal further write-downs of at least four billion pounds. That would be in addition to the 20 billion pounds of write-downs the bank has already announced. Since the third quarter of last year, Citi has sold more than 80 billion pounds of assets.
Hundreds of billions of pounds worth of assets are being put on the auction block by the world’s biggest banks as the global credit crisis begins to bite deeper into the economy.