It’s been a wild 24 hours or so for Credit Suisse Group AG — after ABC business journalist David Taylor tweeted (since deleted) that a “credible source” had told him a major international investment bank was on the brink, the rumour mill kicked into overdrive.
This prompted the bank’s chief executive officer Ulrich Koerner to put out a memo playing down speculation surrounding Credit Suisse’s overhaul plans. This, amazingly, did not stop that speculation, and yesterday its shares dropped by more than 10% before climbing back to just below what they were last week.
It got us thinking about some of the most disastrous memo leaks in history.
Amazon
Amazon’s plan to “neutralise” attempts by unions to infiltrate its famously brutal and accident-prone warehouses were revealed in a leaked 2021 memo. Apart from the standard “build a better brand/befriend the right stakeholders” stuff, the plan was to hire vulnerable students and ex-inmates. We also know, via another leaked memo, that its reputation as an employer was making it very difficult to hire people.
Donald Rumsfeld
Donald Rumsfeld, former US defence secretary under president George W Bush, summed up one end of the horrors of the war on terrorism era with a handwritten note he left at the bottom of a memo authorising some of the techniques which came to be known by the vile euphemism “enhanced interrogation”. Regarding the limitation on the use of “stress positions” to four hours he wrote, with middle-management irritation: “I stand for 8-10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to 4 hours?”
Exxon, Shell, BP
Major fossil fuels companies are no strangers to damaging leaks, whether it concerns the discussions between British government ministers and the world’s largest oil companies about exploiting Iraq’s oil reserves the year before the invasion, or the revelations that the Gulf of Mexico spill was up to 100 times worse than initially reported. But for the sake of timeliness, let’s focus on the recent tranche revealed by the US House committee on oversight and reform, which was stuffed with damaging revelations.
There were the documents featuring Crikey’s favourite carbon abatement technology, carbon capture and storage — BP’s internal documents say it could “enable the full use of fossil fuels across the energy transition and beyond” while Shell’s directive to employees that “we want to be careful to not talk about CCUS as prolonging the life of oil, gas or fossil fuels writ large”, raises a lot of questions answered by the directive. Shell also made sure its PR guidance avoided any pesky commitments:
Please do not give the impression that Shell is willing to reduce carbon dioxide emissions to levels that do not make business sense.
