Some 230 employees of Citi in Bermuda will have to wait to find out the fate of their jobs after the massive corporation announced this week it would be cutting 52,000 jobs from its operations globally.

Inquiries to the local Citi office on whether jobs will be affected on the Island were answered by a Citi spokeswoman in New York, Nina Das, yesterday.

Ms Das said Citi would not be breaking down the massive layoffs by location or business at this time. Citi has a presence in 100 countries around the world and is the US's second largest bank.

"These cuts are across Citi," Ms Das said. "Each business will be affected but we are not able to provide a breakdown at this point."

Ms Das also said she was unable to say when a breakdown of lay-offs might be available.

Staff in Bermuda — like all Citi staff worldwide — were invited to a virtual town hall meeting to be informed of the lay-offs and the financial condition of the company, Ms Das added.

This meeting was closed to the media, however, extensive speaking notes from the podium were made public on Citi's website (www.citigroup.com).

According to the notes, CEO Vikran Pandit told employees that the company would be reducing head count to 300,000 from the 352,000 employees it had worldwide in the third quarter of 2008. Half of these jobs cuts are expected to come from asset sales and half from lay-offs and implementation is expected to go through early 2009.

"The most difficult part of what we all have to do is telling a colleague that their talent may be needed elsewhere and not at Citi," Mr. Pandit said. "There is nothing easy about these decisions and the impact on our people. We do this because we must and not because we want to.

"Around the world our reengineering efforts among other efficiency efforts have led us to a situation where we have had to start informing some of our colleagues of this decision. I would have preferred to have announced this after the fact but given the news stories and out of respect for everyone here, I thought it was important to share that with you. It is the toughest part of everything we do."

Citi's presence in Bermuda grew considerably last year when it bought out the Bisys Group for $1.47 billion in May. Through the move Citi hoped to broaden its services to hedge funds and private equity firms to include accounting and other administrative tasks. Citi already had a small presence on the Island at the time of the takeover, having previously purchased the Forum Financial Group in November 2003.

Citi's Bermuda operations — Citi Hedge Fund Services and Citigroup Fund Services (Bermuda) — fall within the company's Global Transaction Services Group.

The global market meltdown has hit this side of the financial industry hard as well and, with Citi's Bermuda operations' financial health largely dependent fees earned from its assets under administration, cutbacks may be likely.

"I think Citi will be cutting back on staff providing administrative and accounting services to hedge funds and private equity firms because both of them are getting much smaller due to weak financial performance and investor withdrawals," industry analyst Peter Cohan, of Peter S. Cohan and Associates, told The Royal Gazette. "This is a shrinking industry and a logical place for Citi to cut."

The Royal Gazette understands that Citi staff members in Bermuda have been given no additional information on the future of the local operations. Staff members are said to be uncertain about what the developments will mean for their jobs but not overly worried at this time.