NEW YORK (AP) — Former star technology banker Frank Quattrone took the witness stand at his retrial yesterday and bluntly denied he obstructed justice by sending an e-mail message in 2000 encouraging the destruction of files.
Mr. Quattrone testified his e-mail had “nothing to do” with a warning he received two days earlier that his bank, Credit Suisse First Boston, was the subject of a criminal probe into stock allocation.
“I was thinking about cleaning off my desk and getting home for dinner,” Mr. Quattrone said of the e-mail at the heart of the case. “I wasn’t thinking about an investigation.”
The 48-year-old former banker took the stand on the eighth day of his retrial on charges of obstruction of justice and witness tampering. His first trial ended in a hung jury in the fall.
Testifying was something of a gamble for Mr. Quattrone. Jurors said after the first trial that he had hurt his own case by appearing combative and evasive under cross-examination.
Yesterday, under questioning by his own attorney, John W. Keker, Mr. Quattrone appeared confident, angling his body to face jurors and occasionally smiling at them.
He recounted a warning from CSFB lawyer David Brodsky on Dec. 3, 2000, that a federal grand jury was looking into allocations of initial public offerings of stock by the bank.
But Mr. Quattrone says allocations were handled by a different part of his bank — separate from the investment bankers he commanded as the $120 million-salary chief of CSFB’s Technology Group.
On Dec. 4, CSFB staffer Richard Char sent an e-mail message to investment bankers urging them to “clean up those files.” Mr. Quattrone endorsed the note on Dec. 5, adding, “I strongly advise you to follow these procedures.”
CSFB’s document-retention policy required employees to destroy some old documents, unless employees were aware the documents were under subpoena or the subject of other litigation.
Mr. Keker asked: “Had anyone told you prior to December 5 that there were subpoenas outstanding that called for all IPOs over the last two years?”
Mr. Quattrone answered flatly: “No.”
Asked whether he was worried in the days after his e-mail, when CSFB lawyers sent out a broad notice requiring employees to preserve all IPO documents, he said he was not.
“Mister Brodsky told me that first of all that the firm hadn’t done anything wrong,” he said. “This investigation appeared to me to be in a different part of the bank. It involved IPO allocation.”
Mr. Keker sought to draw out in direct questioning of Mr. Quattrone what prosecutors played as something of a surprise in the first trial — that the banker had some influence over who got IPO shares from the bank.
For each of several IPOs over which Mr. Quattrone had influence, Mr. Keker asked whether he was ashamed by it, and Mr. Quattrone said he was not.
Prosecutor David Anders began what is expected to be a lengthy cross-examination of Mr. Quattrone in the afternoon, seeking to tie him to several stages in the IPO allocation process.
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