Mr. Inside

Citigroup’s new hire has been in the middle of everything from the savings and loan disaster to Plamegate.

Liz Lynch / NY Times

Gretchen Morgenson and Andrew Martin, The New York Times | Full Story | ALL of the nation’s major banks have a raft of Washington lobbyists, and with good reason. For people accustomed to dealing with numbers on Wall Street, the nation’s capital can seem impossibly complex.

Still, people inside and outside hobbled Citigroup say they were stunned when Richard D. Parsons, the bank’s chairman, enlisted the services last spring of Richard F. Hohlt, a longtime Washington insider with a history of aggressive advocacy for the banking industry.

Critics say that as a top lobbyist for the savings and loan industry in the 1980s, Mr. Hohlt blocked regulation of these institutions and played a pivotal role helping to prolong dubious industry practices that cost taxpayers $150 billion to clean up.

After that crisis passed, he faded from the public eye but continued advising clients, cementing his contacts in the news media and even surfacing as one among a handful of Washington insiders involved in the public outing of Valerie Wilson as a C.I.A. agent. >>

Published 09.10.10 00:00:00 -0500 GMT | Posted by Andrew Garib on 09.10.14 | On the Web at: http://saveandrewgarib.com/articles/607 |