BY MARK HARRINGTON
mark.harrington@newsday.com
June 14, 2007
Wall Street veteran Lewis Ranieri stepped
aside as chairman of CA Inc. today, ending a three-year term that spanned
the Islandia software company's most turbulent years as well as its path
to a turnaround.
Ranieri, 60, remains a CA director. Fellow board member William McCracken,
a former IBM official who joined CA's board in 2005, takes the chairman's
role effective immediately. McCracken is the director who led a committee
that recently produced a scathing report of CA's scandal-plagued past.
Ranieri has been a CA director since 2001, a position he said he took at
the urging of his long-time friends Alfonse D'Amato and Dick Grasso. (Both
were CA directors then, but Grasso, a former New York Stock Exchange
chairman, has since left the board.)
When a massive federal accounting investigation first rocked the company
in 2002, Ranieri was appointed lead independent director of CA, one of the
first directors of a public company to take on such a role.
As the accounting scandal reached CA's upper executive ranks, Ranieri took
the chairman's post from former CA executive Sanjay Kumar in 2004, a role
Kumar gave up under an investigative cloud. Kumar later pleaded guilty to
securities fraud and obstruction of justice and awaits serving a 12-year
jail sentence.
Long before joining CA's board, Ranieri was vice chairman of Salomon
Brothers, the Wall Street firm where he was credited with creating the
mortgage-backed securities industry and a tradition of pranks and gluttony
chronicled in the book, "Liar's Poker."
As CA chairman, Ranieri put himself front and center in working with the
government to avoid a corporate indictment of the company. In a statement
yesterday, Ranieri referred to the recently completed deferred prosecution
agreement he helped negotiate with prosecutors.
There were some high-profile missteps. Shortly after taking the chairman's
seat, he is reported to have infuriated federal prosecutors after publicly
describing Kumar as CA's "single most important corporate resource" as
investigators were closing in on the former CEO.
McCracken, like CA chief executive John Swainson, is a veteran of IBM,
from which he retired in 2001 after more than 36 years. He has led IBM's
PC and printer divisions before going on to form a consulting firm.
McCracken, 64, joined CA's board in February, 2005.
Gary Lutin, an investment banker who leads a CA shareholder forum, called
McCracken's appointment "a step in the right direction."
Swainson in a memo to employees today said Ranieri's "determination and
foresight during a difficult time laid the foundation for the successes we
enjoyed this past year – and for the bright future we are creating
together."
