private jet

Associated Press photo by Elaine Thompson

 

By Frank James

The Wall Street Journal throws another log on the populist-rage bonfire today with this gem: top executives of companies that received federal bailout money kept flying their bank's corporate jets to personal getaways. The only question now is which member of Congress will the the first to express OUTRAGE?

An excerpt:

Regions Financial Corp. of Birmingham, Ala., received $3.5 billion from the Treasury Department's Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, on Nov. 14. Twelve days later, the day before Thanksgiving, two Regions jets left Birmingham within minutes of each other, bound for a small airport in West Virginia.
The destination: the historic Greenbrier resort, where the bank's chief executive, C. Dowd Ritter, and family members spent four nights over the holiday, according to a person familiar with his accommodations.
The round-trip flights cost Regions roughly $17,700, according to a calculation by Conklin & de Decker Aviation Information, a consulting firm. A Regions spokesman declined to comment on the trip or the cost estimate but said all travel on company jets "either for personal or business was within our policy."

Citigroup, which canceled taking delivery of a new jet only after a controversy that ultimately drew President Barack Obama's attention, also gets a prominent mention in the story:

At Citigroup, two days after the bank canceled the jet order Mr. Obama criticized, former Chief Executive Sanford Weill boarded a Citigroup-owned plane for a flight to a small airport at Saranac Lake in New York state's woodsy Adirondack region. Flight records show it was the seventh trip a Citigroup plane had made to Saranac Lake, near where Mr. Weill has a vacation home, since the bank first received federal aid last fall.


The flight returned to its point of origin, in Westchester County north of New York City, on Sunday, Feb. 1. That same day, Mr. Weill announced he was waiving his contractual right to use Citigroup aircraft. His spokesman said Mr. Weill "cares deeply about the future of Citi and recognizes the extraordinary commitment by the American taxpayer." The statement came on the same day that a much longer Weill flight on a Citigroup jet -- taking family members to the Mexican resort town of San Jose del Cabo in Baja California over New Year's -- was disclosed in the New York Post.


That plane, a Bombardier Global Express, sat on the ground at Cabo for eight days, FAA records obtained by the Journal show. The cost to Citigroup of the round-trip flight was about $33,500, according to Conklin & de Decker, a consulting firm based in Orleans, Mass., that was asked to make an estimate.


A spokesman for Citigroup said personal use of company planes is limited to certain executives, who are encouraged to fly commercial when possible.

It will be interesting to see how much the banks and the CEOs change their behavior, if at all since it should be clear now, if it wasn't before, that their personal use of corporate jets is not going unnoticed.

9:29 - June 19, 2009

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