New York Times :: After Criticism, a Top Analyst Quits Salomon Jack Grubman, the beleaguered telecommunications analyst who was once among the most powerful figures on Wall Street, resigned from Salomon Smith Barney yesterday by what the firm described as mutual agreement. News Wires report that Jack Grubman, Salomon Smith Barney’s star telecoms analyst, resigned on Thursday. He will receive a $32m pay-off. This consists of a $19m loan that is being forgiven, $12m in restricted equity and $1.2m in salary.

According to Bloomberg, Citigroup faces criminal probes, a congressional subpoena, regulatory investigations and more than two dozen lawsuits over allegations that Grubman violated rules by functioning as an investment banker while he was employed as an analyst at the firm’s Salomon Smith Barney unit.

“His current status, whether he is an employee or not, doesn’t matter,” said Darren Dopp, a spokesman for New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, who’s probing Salomon and Grubman. “The investigation continues based on the fact that he was an employee at the time of the events we are looking at,” Bloomberg reports.

Breaking Views, however is more cautious and balanced when it writes: “It’s easy to make a scapegoat out of Jack Grubman. But that would be too easy. The former Salomon analyst wasn’t a single rotten apple in a barrel of good ones. Rather, he was astonishingly good at playing a rotten game that was rife on Wall Street.”