Shadowy Citi Trader Demands $100M Payout

Andrew J. Hall, the man who runs Citi’s shadowy energy-trading unit, is demanding the company pay him up to $100 million to honor a previously agreed-upon 2009 pay package, the Wall Street Journal reports. If Citi doesn’t pay up, Hall could walk and sue, but paying could be a political and PR nightmare, raising the ire of the government’s new pay czar.

Hall’s not your typical Wall Street suit. An avid art collector, he owns an almost 1,000-year-old castle in Germany and once tried to put an 80-foot concrete sculpture on his Connecticut lawn. He runs his secretive Phibro LLC unit from the site of a former Connecticut dairy farm. Phibro occasionally posts huge profits, and Hall is supposed to be paid accordingly. But the Treasury pay czar says TARP recipients need to prove they’re not rewarding risk-taking. (More Citigroup stories.)