Citigroup, Banks | featured news

A Manhattan federal judge on Monday signaled he will not rubber-stamp Citigroup Inc's proposed $590 million settlement of a shareholder lawsuit accusing it of hiding tens of billions of dollars of toxic mortgage assets.

Citigroup Inc posted $2.32 billion of charges for layoffs and lawsuits in its first financial report under new Chief Executive Michael Corbat, who said the bank needs to do better for shareholders.

Since the financial crisis Citigroup has managed to firm up its balance sheet and fence off most of the toxic assets that brought the bank to its knees. Some shareholders want the firm to go further though, and the latest call for a breakup comes from an unlikely source.

Former chief executive of Citigroup Vikram Pandit receives $15m after resigning from the banking giant last month.

Massachusetts fined Citigroup $2 million to settle charges that two bank analysts improperly released confidential information about Facebook's financials before the technology company went public.

Vikram Pandit abruptly stepped down as CEO of Citigroup on Tuesday, shocking Wall Street, after steering the bank through the 2008 financial crisis and the choppy years that followed.

Citigroup Inc said quarterly profit plunged on a $4.7 billion write-down of its stake in a brokerage operated by Morgan Stanley, but mortgage lending increased and capital markets results rebounded.

The institution is accelerating its cost-cutting strategy, planning to pare its operations so much that it will lose its spot as the nation’s largest bank employer, falling behind the likes of JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo and Citigroup.

Citigroup said on Wednesday that it had agreed to pay $590 million to settle a class action lawsuit brought by shareholders who contended that they had been misled about the bank’s exposure to subprime mortgage debt on the eve of the financial crisis.

Citigroup Inc reported lower second-quarter profit on Monday as the big banking group lost money on the sale of a stake in a Turkish bank and suffered from the drag of its troubled assets left over from the 2008 credit crisis.