• Source: Joseph Gentile

      • Joseph Gentile (born 1969) is a businessman noted for having served as both CFO of Lehman Brothers - the bank whose collapse in 2008 marked the climax of the 2007-2008 Financial Crisis, and the Chief Administrative Officer of SVB Securities, sister company to Silicon Valley Bank, which in 2023 suffered the third largest bank collapse in US history.


      Biography


      Gentile received a bachelor's degree in accounting and a master's degree of Business Administration in Finance from St John's University. He worked at numerous high-profile banks and investment firms including Arthur Andersen and JP Morgan. He was CFO of the Private Bank, the CEO of the Global Corporate and Investment Bank at the Bank of America, and finally the CFO for Lehman Brothers' Global Investment Bank.
      Gentile was intimately involved with the Lehman Brothers collapse. Gentile was the original sender of an email in February 2007 proposing the use of Repo 105 to hide the bank's losses from investors, an abuse of a legal loophole that was later identified as a key cause of its bankruptcy. A large number of emails cited in bankruptcy proceedings were authored by Gentile, who also served as a key witness in these proceedings. When questioned about this mechanism, he admitted it had no legitimate business purpose, and was not used by any other bank he had previously worked for. He was taught about this method, he said, by Ed Grieb, the Global Financial Controller of Lehman Brothers, and then proceeded to use them without understanding their actual working as a way to, in the words of one witness, 'window-dress' Lehman Brothers' 'balance-sheet'.
      He left Lehman Brothers in 2007 - a year before its collapse - to work as Chief Administrative Officer at SVB Securities . When SVB Securities' sister company Silicon Valley Bank collapsed in 2023, a connection between the two collapses, with Gentile at its centre, was raised by many online. This was often accompanied by false assertions that Gentile had a lead position in Silicon Valley Bank itself, or that there was evidence that he had been involved in its collapse. SVB Securities insisted he had no meaningful role in either collapse, although this is untrue; as noted above, bankruptcy proceedings show he played a major role in the Lehman Brothers collapse, despite leaving before it occurred. Given the close financial ties between the two companies, the exact nature of his involvement in the second collapse, unlike the first, remains unclear. It is also unclear why Gentile left Lehman Brothers at the time that he did.


      References

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