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Walsh's Conflict of Interest
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Business New Haven
08/18/2003
By: BNH
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The publisher and chief executive officer of the New Haven Register is Kevin F. Walsh.
He is employed by the Journal Register Co. of Trenton, N.J. (NYSE: JRC), whose "flagship" daily is the Register. Working his way up the JRC corporate ladder, Walsh hasn't been in New Haven very long. But he has been here long enough to get himself named a corporator of New Haven Savings Bank, two-thirds of whom must approve of bank management's plan to convert from mutual to public stock ownership, announced last month (BNH, Aug. 4).
Officers, directors and corporators of the bank potentially stand to reap a substantial financial windfall from taking their 165-year-institution public. Directors of the Savings Bank of Manchester, one of two institutions NHSB plans to gobble up using proceeds from the stock windfall, voted themselves $1.4 million each converting their bank to public ownership (see story, page 1).
All the more curious that, when the New Haven Register editorialized in favor of the change on August 3. "The bank's transformation should make a local community pillar stronger," said the Sunday editorial.
What it did not say was that Register boss Walsh is a corporator of the bank and by definition faces a conflict of interest in attempting to influence others who will decide the bank's fate.
(Walsh deferred BNH questions about this to editorial page Editor Charles P. Kochakian. Efforts to reach Kochakian were not successful.)
If he intends for his newspaper to play an active part in this process, Walsh must resign, immediately, as a corporator of the bank. It's that simple.
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