Ex-Time Warner chief apologises for AOL disaster deal 10 years ago

飞雪寒冰

Jerry Levin, who sold Time Warner for AOL shares inflated by the dotcom boom, has marked the 10th anniversary of the disastrous $164bn deal with a call for today's corporate titans to accept responsibility for the recent financial crisis.

The former Time Warner chief executive, having avoided apologising for the billions of dollars destroyed by the deal, yesterday made a belated mea culpa. He told CNBC that he was sorry for the “pain and suffering and loss” caused by the merger.

“I presided over the worst deal of the century, apparently, and I guess it's time for those who are involved in companies to stand up and say: you know what, I'm solely responsible for it,” said Mr Levin. “I was in charge. I'm really very sorry about the pain and the suffering and loss that was caused. I take responsibility.”

He added: “It wasn't the board. It wasn't my colleagues at Time Warner. It wasn't the bankers, the lawyers . . . it was not Steve Case [the former CEO of AOL].”

飞雪寒冰

Mr Levin combined his apology with a call for the most prominent business leaders of the past decade to follow his example. “Where is the stand-up leadership that's going to take responsibility for what's happened and do something about it?” he asked.

Citing a New York Times article on Sandy Weill, the former Citigroup boss who said he felt “incredibly sad” about the bank's decline but pinned much of the blame on his successor, Mr Levin said Citigroup, AIG and General Electric had the same problem as Time Warner: “It was not a supermarket, it was a [shopping] mall.”

“Not only the three companies I just mentioned but let's hear publicly from Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, on and on,” he added.

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zhaoxinghua0623

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