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SAN FRANCISCO Gilt Groupe said on Thursday it hired board member and Citigroup Inc Internet executive Michelle Peluso as chief executive as the e-commerce company prepares for a possible initial public offering next year. Peluso will replace Gilt founder and current CEO Kevin Ryan in late February. Ryan will become chairman of Gilt and the company’s current chairman Susan Lyne will be vice chairman, the company said. Ryan founded Gilt in 2007 as the first major flash sales company in the United States. Flash sales, pioneered by Vente Privee in France, are limited-time, online sales of mostly luxury goods such [...]

LONDON Citigroup has started a sale process for its consumer banking operations in Turkey and has held talks on a possible deal, a person familiar with the matter said. Citigroup said earlier on Wednesday it was cutting 11,000 jobs worldwide to save as much as $ 1.1 billion a year in costs, and that plan would include selling or significantly scaling back its consumer operations in Turkey. Citi has more than 2,000 staff in Turkey, where it operated its first branch in 1981. It launched its consumer banking business there in 1996 and in 2006 bought a 20 percent stake [...]

Citigroup Inc has agreed to pay $ 360 million to the brokerage estate of Lehman Brothers to resolve a dispute over $ 1 billion in collateral that the investment bank was forced to post in the days leading up to its bankruptcy in 2008. According to a settlement reached on Friday with the trustee liquidating Lehman Brothers’s U.S. brokerage unit, Citigroup will also relinquish its claim to $ 75 million that was contingently paid to the estate at the beginning of the liquidation, court documents showed. The trustee, James Giddens, filed the claim against Citigroup and its subsidiaries early last [...]

Citigroup Inc is on track to cut 300 sales and trading jobs globally this year, as part of its plan to streamline its banking operations, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing people briefed on the process. The sales and trading unit of the bank employs about 17,000 people, the Journal said. (http://link.reuters.com/kyz93t) A Citigroup spokeswoman declined to comment specifically on the latest round of cuts but said the company had “been making targeted headcount reductions throughout the year in certain businesses and functions across Citi as part of our efforts to control expenses during the current environment”, the Journal said. [...]

NEW YORK A lawyer for Abu Dhabi Investment Authority urged a U.S. judge on Thursday to overturn an arbitration panel’s ruling favoring Citigroup Inc in a dispute over a $ 7.5 billion investment in Citi during the subprime meltdown. The Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund last year lost the arbitration case, which sought $ 4 billion in damages from what it said were the fraudulent representations by Citi leading up to the deal. At a hearing in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, a lawyer for the fund said the arbitrators applied the wrong law to come to its decision. “They [...]

BOSTON Some of Citigroup Inc’s banking sites went down for about half an hour on Wednesday, making its online banking system temporarily inaccessible to customers, some of whom were housebound in the wake of giant storm Sandy. Bank spokesman Andrew Brent said the outage also affected applications for mobile devices such as the iPad, but that all sites and apps had been restored to service. He declined to discuss the cause of the outage. Citi, Bank of America Corp, JPMorgan Chase & Co and other U.S. banks have repeatedly been attacked by Iranian hackers over the past year as part [...]

SAN FRANCISCO Two Citi analysts — including senior Internet analyst Mark Mahaney — were fired from the brokerage over matters relating to the disclosures, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal on Friday morning. The terminations were reported as the Massachusetts Securities Division announced that it has imposed a $ 2 million fine against Citigroup for improperly disclosing non-public information related to Facebook Inc.’s initial public offering in May. In a consent order posted on the state government website, the Massachusetts agency said Citigroup “failed to prevent or detect the written disclosure of material, nonpublic research information in [...]

NEW YORK In the summer of 2011, Yahoo Inc’s board decided enough was enough. Directors had seen the Internet giant’s stock languish, and the answers they got from Carol Bartz, chief executive at the time, fell short of their expectations. So, the board held a final meeting in Los Angeles, away from Yahoo’s Silicon Valley headquarters, to review the company’s progress, a source familiar with the matter said. One of their conclusions? Fire Bartz, the source said. Such scenes are relatively rare, but could be played out more frequently across corporate America as companies increasingly split the roles of chairman [...]

TOKYO Asian shares rose on Tuesday after rallies in U.S. stocks and positive U.S. data cheered investor mood, with hopes for some progress in the euro zone debt crisis also helping to underpin sentiment. The MSCI index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan <.MIAPJ0000PUS> inched up 0.4 percent, with Australian shares rising 0.6 percent and South Korean shares <.KS11> opening 0.9 percent higher. Japan’s Nikkei average <.N225> opened up 0.7 percent. U.S. stocks climbed on Monday after earnings from Citigroup Inc , the third-largest U.S. bank, and retail sales strongly beat expectations. An earnings report from Goldman Sachs is scheduled on [...]

Have you seen Citi’s new television commercial, “The Ex?” It shows a man consoling himself after his girlfriend breaks up with him because he’s boring. He resolves to become interesting by filling his time with exciting activities. He cooks with a famous chef, visits an art gallery and attends an Alicia Keys concert, after which he meets the star herself.Credit card perks and celebrity experiencesThe point of the ad is that all of these activities were arranged through the Citi Private Pass online service, which is open to all holders of Citi debit and credit cards. This doesn’t just allow [...]