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The Right Kind of Banker
Posted by Tom McFeely
Wednesday, February 25, 2009 10:20 AM
Applause for Jayne and Leonard Abbess (front row center) during President Obama's speech. (Reuters)
In his address last evening to Congress, President Barack Obama singled out Miami banker Leonard Abess Jr. as an example of the kind of corporate leadership America needs.
Why was Abess singled out? For his extraordinary decision to give $60 million from the proceeds he received when he sold his majority interest in Miami-based City National Bancshares last November to his tellers, bookkeepers, clerks and other bank employees.
According to this article from McClatchy newspapers, all 399 workers on the bank’s staff received bonuses and Abess also contacted 72 former employees to share in his generosity.
For some employees, the bonus exceeded $100,000.
“It was like a lottery, only better,” Virginia C. Dunn, managing senior vice president, said of the gift, McClatchy Newspapers reported. “Because it came from someone’s heart.”
Abess’s example is a heartening contrast to the greed exhibited by some other executives of financial companies who pocketed huge personal payments even as their institutions, and Americans as a whole, were facing up to the ugly realities of the global financial crisis.
And Abbess sought no publicity for his exceptional generosity.
“But in my life, I have also learned that hope is found in unlikely places; that inspiration often comes not from those with the most power or celebrity, but from the dreams and aspirations of Americans who are anything but ordinary,” Obama said in his speech last night. “I think about Leonard Abess, the bank president from Miami who reportedly cashed out of his company, took a $60 million bonus, and gave it out to all 399 people who worked for him, plus another 72 who used to work for him. He didn’t tell anyone, but when the local newspaper found out, he simply said, ‘I knew some of these people since I was 7 years old. I didn’t feel right getting the money myself.’”
| Filed under barack obama, financial crisis
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