About the time that the President of the bank sold all of his stock and pulled all of his assets out of the bank? IF the FBI truly were investigating criminal activity without bias, I think this would be a good place to start.
Only an idiot would believe it a coincidence that the President of SVD sold all of his stock and pulled all of his assets out of the bank - not fully knowing that the bank was about to collapse.
Regarding the Israeli banks. People have relationships in the business world. Business associates can also be friends. Friends share info between themselves that they would not otherwise share. The old saying is true, "it's not what you know, it's who you know."
You can believe that the Israeli banks and others made the move to get their money out just in time because of their objective analysis and research on the health of SVD - or you can believe they had friends/connections at SVD that convinced them a collapse was imminent.
In either case, what does it matter?
What galls me is that the army of bank regulators whose job is to monitor the health of our banks FAILED. Will any of those people be fired?
He didn’t sell all his assets. He exercised his annual options.
When I worked at a larger bank we got out options packages in March. We also got our bonuses in March—as that was the deadline for the bank to tak them on the previous year’s taxes.
Options would vest over 7 years. In our case, for example, the Executive level was granted options in year 0 that were at a price around $1.35. This was right after the banking crisis in the 1990s.
7 years later, the stock was in the low $30’s based on actions taken by that executive team. In March of year 7, these executives received their bonuses and turned around and cashed in those options; they were worth about $35 in profit. If they didn’t do that, they would lose millions of dollars.
The second point is that the top earners of the bank could only exercise their options during specific periods. And, they had to notify the regulators when they did it.
So, a bank President exercising options and getting paid their bonuses in March is “normal.”
Did the President know his bank was on shaky ground? Absolutely. He would have known that for months.
My point is not to defend this person—they acted like an idiot. My point is to explain how options and bonuses are paid in a banking operation.