(This story has been posted on The Wall Street Journal Online's Financial Adviser blog.)
If UBS AG (UBS) has in mind to hire former Merrill Lynch retail brokerage head Robert McCann to run its wealth-management businesses in the Americas, why doesn't it just say so? Three possible reasons come to mind:
One, maybe remote, is that UBS isn't hiring him and never meant to. That would mean the whole story--beginning with reports going back months and kept alive by McCann's lawsuit, now settled, to get his former employer Bank of America Corp. (BAC) to OK his taking up a "once in a lifetime" position at a rival firm, as McCann put it in court documents--was a red herring: he's going somewhere other than UBS.
When, in an interview conducted after the out-of-court settlement of his dispute with Bank of America a few weeks ago, the brokerage-trade journal Registered Rep asked if he was headed to UBS, McCann said he wasn't at liberty to "talk about any specific opportunity, or any specific company" except to say he expected "to be working and fully engaged in late October in a new project back in financial services in the New York area."
Or it could be that UBS, which has never officially commented on McCann, had in mind to hire him to replace Martin Hoekstra as head of its Wealth Management Americas unit--which consists of its U.S. retail brokerage, private banking in the U.S. and Canada and U.S.-booked advisory products and services for non-U.S. clients--but has since backed away; perhaps because of the fuss over the lawsuit. McCann's legal efforts and his tone with Registered Rep might preclude this possibility, but that's assuming he was privy to decisions made by a firm that didn't yet employ him.
A third possibility is that UBS intends to hire McCann but that his settlement with Bank of America, which bought Merrill just prior to his departure in January, forces the Swiss bank to remain, for the moment, silent on its plans for him.
Of these possible scenarios only the last one holds any water, according to David Silver of Los Angeles-based Silver Public Relations-- but even then, he says UBS should explain, to the best of its ability, why it refuses to say anything about McCann.
"If it's for legal reasons, they should reach out and say so," says Silver. "They should go ahead and tell the truth."
Adds Silver: "The number one downfall of the brilliant men and women who run our large corporations--and their boards--is a failure of communication. Until that's fixed and there's a radical shift in corporate PR, you're going to continue to get these ridiculous 'no comments,' and the press is going to fill in the gaps."
When asked to provide its reason for not commenting on its relationship with McCann, UBS declined to comment.
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