Citi's Pandit: Collateral Damage

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Citigroup(C) CEO Vikram Pandit can expect his life to get even more difficult now that Ken Lewis is leaving Bank of America(BAC) at the end of the year.

"I would say that's a commonsensical observation," said John Gutfreund, the former CEO of Salomon Brothers, the legendary investment bank that became part of Citigroup in 1999.

Asked by TheStreet.com whether he thought Pandit should go, Gutfreund said, "I have no opinion on that. I can't have an opinion about everything. I don't know everything about everything."

Asked whether he thought Pandit had done a good job running the bank, Gutfreund thought for a moment and said, "No comment."

Pandit, a former finance professor who's known for being brainy but uncharismatic, took the top job at Citigroup in December 2007 following a more than 20-year career at Morgan Stanley(MS). He also had a brief but undistinguished stint running a hedge fund that Citi acquired in April of that year, principally because former Treasury Secretary and Goldman Sachs (GS) star Robert Rubin, who sat on Citi's board until January of this year, had an eye on Pandit as a potential CEO, according to a profile of Pandit in New York Magazine in March of this year.

At Citi, Pandit pored over Citi's books and uncovered what would eventually turn out to be billions in subprime losses, leading to the ouster of Chuck Prince as CEO, as the profile tells it. Rubin eventually persuaded Citi's board to give Pandit the top job.