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People's Bank |
I'm a People's Bank retail customer. When I moved to Connecticut, I
was a veteran of opening accounts at small, community-based banks only
to have them absorbed by merger into larger and less customer-focused
institutions. So I interviewed people at all of my neighborhood banks
to find out about their vulnerability to such takeovers. People's Bank
impressed me with their line that the depositors owned the bank and
the board was committed to never selling out. Uh-huh. I drank the Kool-
Aid.
So when they decided to let us depositors vote on whether to go
forward with their big public offering, I was inclined to vote no,
knowing full well that my vote wouldn't count for much. At the same
time, they offered to sweeten the deal by letting depositors purchase
shares at $20. The accompanying material indicated that the stock had
been trading in the $40 range, so this sounded like a good deal. If
I'd read all the exceedingly voluminous fine print, I might also have
learned that the $40 price was from before the 21:10 stock split.
Anyway, sure, I hedged my bet and bought some stock, not enough to
hurt myself, I'm happy to say. And it's been downhill ever since.
Now the board has decided to reward top executives for, um, the
performance of the stock???? I dunno. What, exactly, ARE we rewarding
them for? Tell me again what John Klein has done to deserve $44
million as a retention bonus.