BlackRock Dismisses Three Executives Who Planned To Quit In Coordinated Fashion

BlackRock reportedly has dismissed three private equity executives that had planned to leave the company in a “coordinated fashion”, according to a leaked internal memo reported on by Bloomberg this week.

The trio, who were were managing directors in the company’s secondaries business, had coordinated an effort to leave the company in unison.

Perhaps fearing a public relations crisis a la that of the Goldman junior banker fiasco from years ago, BlackRock decided to get ahead of the news and announced to its own employees that it had dismissed the three workers instead. 

The employees, Konnin Tam, Steve Lessar and Veena Isaac, helped manage a $3 billion strategy, the Bloomberg writeup notes. The three are leaving to join Apollo Global Management Inc., according to Yahoo. 

According to that report, the workers’ lawyers said they had a “desire to work cooperatively during the transition” and that they “also told BlackRock that they would depart immediately or before the end of a 90-day notice period if that’s what the company preferred, according to two people who shared the contents of a resignation letter.”

An internal memo to Blackrock employees said: “The action we took reflects how seriously we take our commitment to putting the interests of our clients first and how the actions of these individuals fell short of what we expect of our employees.”

Edwin Conway, global head of BlackRock Alternative Investors, and Russell Steenberg, global head of BlackRock Private Equity Partners, said in the memo: “BlackRock made the decision to terminate all three employees after learning of their intention to depart the firm in a coordinated fashion.”

The move seems somewhat bizarre to us. Why would the company fire the employees who planned on quitting anyway? Now it’s far more likely that BlackRock could be on the hook for paying the fired employees’ benefits.

We won’t be surprised if there’s “another shoe to drop” in this story. We’ll keep our eyes peeled…