Open Letter To Citibank President Vikram Pandit a.k.a Loan Shark Vik "the Ram" Bandit

Here is a letter that I sent to Citibank today. I will continue to update you on a regular basis if I receive a response.....................or if I do not.................


September 16, 2009

Dear Mr. Pandit and Mr. Galant,

I am writing this morning to bring to your attention some serious concerns I have with your banking practices.

I have been a Citibank card holder since 2003. Between 2003 and today I have never
been late paying my Citibank account and I have never gone over my credit limit. In
addition to my Citibank card, my husband also has a mortgage, credit card, and HELOC
with your institution. Citibank is the largest holder of our joint debt and we have never been late on any of our Citibank accounts. I would further add that if you were to review our combined credit history you would not find a single collection account, late payment,or other blemish. The point I am trying to make Mr. Pandit and Mr. Galant is that we pay our bills and we pay them on time every month. No matter the circumstance we always manage to pay our bills.



In 2002 my husband was laid off from IBM and he decided to begin a new business – we
financed a great deal of the business start up with credit cards. In addition while we had periods of economic difficulty we sometimes relied on consumer credit to make ends meet. I will also admit that we made purchases on credit that we may not have otherwise made if we needed to pay cash.

My husband and I are paying for these decisions today. My husband works a full time job in addition to operating his business and I work outside of my field so that I have higher earning potential. This is not ideal for either of us and the reality is if we had not taken on so much consumer debt we could pay our living expenses solely off of the profits of my husband’s business.

We made a conscious decision to work harder to pay off the debt that we accumulated.
This decision was driven by a moral compass – that says we are responsible for the debts we incur. We share a common belief, that nothing in life is free. This was not a decision that we had to make – my husband did not have to get a 2nd full time job and I did not have to take a job in a field that is not my first choice – we did this because we are moral people and we do not shirk our responsibilities. Frankly Mr. Pandit and Mr. Galant we could have taken the easy way out and filed for bankruptcy. We did not.

In the Fall of 2008 during the “Economic Crisis” I watched the story unfold of how we got in to the financial mess we are in collectively as a nation. The largest culprits we were led to believe as a nation were those taking part in subprime lending. Mr. Pandit and Mr.Galant you and I both know this is only the tip of the iceberg and only a small part of the story. Mr. Pandit you sat in congress and requested my tax dollars to fix your mess. I can’t even get a tax write off to fix the mess I have with consumer credit debt. The irony is you are receiving my hard earned money to make up for your record losses based on grossly irresponsible business practices and I am paying higher income taxes because I earn more to pay off my debt.

During that same period of time I became the victim of the “Economic Crisis”. Receiving letters from creditors – not saying I was in default or late on a payment but letters cutting my credit limits, increasing my interest rates, and changing terms and conditions on accounts that I had for years, accounts, I might add, that were all in good standing. My husband and I felt the crushing grip of the economic conditions on a daily basis. Through out that period of time we again discussed filing for bankruptcy but we chose not to do that. We continued to work harder and felt even more determined to free of ourselves from being slaves to large banks whose only aim is to reap large profits off the backs of
hard working people.

I thought we had weathered the worst of the storm – we have managed to pay off a large amount of our debt in the last several months and have a plan to be out of credit card debt by November 2010. I set up a strategic plan that involved paying off the most morally corrupt banks first. Our plan was proving to be successful and in fact on September 15th I was able to make a final payment to another card. I was rejoicing in my personal success on my hour commute home only to open up my Citibank statement that came in the mail to feel completely and utterly defeated.

You see Mr. Pandit and Mr. Galant when I opened my Citibank statement it was only to
discover that you had raised my interest rate to 29.99%. This was shock and awe of the Consumer Credit kind. I was completely blindsided and devastated all at the same time. The reason why I was blindsided was because I never received any notification that you were raising my interest rate. I might chalk it up to careless oversight on my part but that is not even a remote possibility. As I mentioned before I have a strategic plan to get out of debt and I examine my financial situation daily. I would have never overlooked such an important piece of information. Your bank would have quickly moved to the top of the list of institutions to pay off in my plan.

I quickly got online to review my account – perhaps I had not paid it on time – perhaps I had debted the wrong payment account – perhaps there was something I was missing. This was not the case, you received your payment on time and there was nothing in the document section of my account notifying me of an interest rate hike.

I then called Citibank to find out what the issue could be. There was no issue with me – the issue as your overworked and underpaid call center operator explained was a rate increase because of the economic times. I tried my best to hold my temper because the last person I want to be angry with is some low wage worker who has to spend their days fielding calls from angry consumers because of your arbitrary decision making.

The people who have to answer your phone calls should be the ones receiving bonuses because they spend their days being abused because of your business decisions. In my mind it is no different then a Mafia boss sending out a teenage kid to be a hit man. No harm no foul right Mr. Pandit and Mr. Galant. As long as you stay far enough removed from the scene of the crime you can sleep at night. In fact you can sleep well because you get extra money from them doing the dirtiest of work for you.

I made 3 subsequent calls to Citibank – one to request every statement ever sent to me (so I could send them to you), the second to seek a reduction in my interest rate, and the third to find out what my Opt Out options were. I have not received the statements but I trust you have access to my account and can see that I have been a model consumer, there was no option for reducing my interest rate, and my Opt Out option expired on September 1st – 14 days prior to receiving my statement reflecting the new and quite frankly obscene interest rate.

Mr. Pandit and Mr. Galant this leaves me in quite the dilemma. As I previously
mentioned I have a strong moral obligation to pay my debt. However I also have another guiding moral principal and that is one of justness and fairness. What you have done is wholly unjust and unfair. What you have done is behaved no differently then your common loan shark. If you behaved this way to someone on the street chances are you would end up in jail or at the very least the person you were extorting for money would be told that they did not have to pay you.

Unfortunately we do not live in a time where consumers are protected from criminal
elements such as yourselves. We live in a time where my tax dollars go to paying your bonuses and build you new executive suites. We live in a time where you can hire people for not much more then minimum wage to shield you from the realities of your business decisions. We live in a time where you can send large amounts of money in political contributions so “Consumer Protection Laws’ passed look more like “Banker Protection Laws”. We live in a time where you can act outside of the law and reap record profits only to turn around and ask for my hard earned tax dollars to bail you out.

I am not sure which guiding moral principal will win out for me personally. I would like to give you an opportunity to address my concerns before I make any further decisions about how I handle my debt with Citibank. I would like for you to have an opportunity to examine your own moral compasses and reflect on what I have shared with you today. My hope is that you adjust my interest rate back to the original rate not because I am one consumer making a lot of noise but because you have some type of moral compass and you recognize from my one voice that you are potentially harming thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people by potentially bringing them to financial ruin in the worst case scenario and in the best case scenario causing them a great deal of mental anguish.

I am faxing this letter today to both of you and all of the people copied below because I believe this matter deserves immediate attention. I will be mailing this letter with supporting documentation when I receive the materials I have requested be mailed to me from Citibank – I will additionally provide you with a copy of my consumer credit report and additional media information related to the Banking Hearings and Citibank’s corporate and banking practices.

Sincerely,
HH

Cc: President Barack Obama, Senator Patrick Leahy, Senator Bernie Sanders, Senator
Christopher Dodd, Representative Peter Welch, Representative Barnie Franks, All
Members of the Citibank Board of Directors

Media Outlets – New York Times, Associated Press, Huffington Post, CNN, MSNBC,
Washington Post, Financial Times