TV journalist gets heavy with Sallie Krawcheck

The search for the right person to fill the biggest vacancy in world banking - CEO of Bank of America to replace Ken Lewis who quit 10 days ago - has turned nasty. One of the contenders - or not, as the case may be - is 45-year-old Sallie Krawcheck and she seems to have made some important enemies on Wall Street, not least the CNBC journalist Charles Gasparino.

Krawcheck first grabbed the business headlines last September when she suddenly left her job as CFO of Citigroup, where she ran the wealth-management division, after a falling-out with CEO Vikram Pandit.

This August, as part of the management shake-up, she was brought in to do the same job for Bank of America - a tough role given the bank's uphill struggle to recover from its controversial merger with Merrill Lynch.

Despite being at Bank of America for only ten weeks or so, her name has been bandied about - some say by Krawcheck herself - as a likely replacement for Lewis, who finally quit after 40 years at the Charlotte, North Carolina-based bank.

Which is where Gasparino comes in. The on-air editor at CNBC has written in a column for Forbes.com that, according to his sources, Krawcheck was a "disaster" at Citi and is totally unqualified for the Bank of America job.

"The CFO post at any bank - not just an amazingly complex institution like Citi, which combines brokerage and commercial banking activities, sales and trading with customer deposits and has offices all around the world - is one of the most difficult jobs on the street," wrote Gasparino. "But Krawcheck didn't just have a difficult time adjusting to the rigours of the position; she was, according to people who covered the firm at the time, a disaster.

"She had almost no grasp of the firm's balance sheet, particularly the build-up of its holdings of toxic debt, which, as Citi shareholders painfully know, led to the massive losses in 2007 and 2008 that forced the firm to seek billions of dollars in government assistance to prevent it from imploding like Lehman [Brothers] and Bear [Stearns]."

As well as questioning Krawcheck's professional qualifications, Gasparino also had a go at her on a personal level.

He quoted a banking executive who said that, despite growing up in South Carolina, Krawcheck had lost her southern accent over the years. However, in her desire to win friends at BofA's Charlotte headquarters, she had apparently deemed it expedient to rediscover her roots. "I hear she uses the term 'y'all' all the time now," Gasparino quoted his contact as saying. ·