Epstein

The New York Times credited celebrity PR powerhouse Peggy Siegal for helping to rehab the image of sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

The July 13 paper profiled NYC’s “most prominent professional hostess” for using her gatekeeping savvy to get Epstein into A-List events and screenings.

There is another PR mover & shaker who didn't make the NYT's cut. That's Doug Band, co-founder of Teneo, which modestly bills itself as “the global CEO advisory firm.”

New York magazine included Band in its July 22-Aug. 4 cover story on influential people attached in some way to Epstein’s world.

It brands Band as a “one-time White House intern who climbed his way to being Bill Clinton’s bag carrier, body man, fixer, and all-purpose gatekeeper.”

Connection to Epstein: Band arranged for the former president to use Epstein's private 727 in 2002 for a trip to Africa.

NYM reports Band went on to help his boss form the Clinton Global Initiative in 2005, “a choice platform from which he launched his own lucrative favor-trading corporate-advisory firm, Teneo.”

Throughout that time, Brand "took a number of trips on Epstein’s plane and attended parties at his townhouse.”

More recently, he's been teaching a public service class at NYU.

Who doesn’t love stock-buybacks? CEOs certainly do.

Stock-buybacks came into vogue during the 1980s as defensive measures to bolster share prices in bids to ward off corporate raiders. But buybacks today are mostly designed to feather the nests of CEO’s and top management, wrote Jerry Useem in the August Atlantic.

According to Goldman Sachs, companies shelled out a whopping $3.8T since 2010 to buy their own stock. That amount tops outlays by individual investors, mutual funds and pensions.

As the mantra of building stockholder value took hold, boards granted CEOs/top management boatloads of stock and options to better align their fortunes with other shareholders.

Useem, contributing writer at the magazine, points out this shift in compensation schemes coincided with the Securities and Exchange Commission’s moves to loosen stock-buyback rules.

And presto: CEOs/management began acquiring ever greater amounts of their own corporate stock, making such manipulation that much more tantalizing.

“Today the abuse of stock buybacks is so widespread that naming abusers is a bit like singling out snowflakes for ruining the driveway,” wrote Ussem, who does mention Home Depot, Merck and Applied Materials.

He notes that early stock certificates used to feature images (factory, auto, train, canal) to reflect the purpose of corporations.

“It was a reminder that the financial instrument was being put to productive use,” Useem wrote. “Corporations that plow their profits into buybacks would be hard-pressed to put an image on their stock certificate today, other than, perhaps, the visage of their CEO.”