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First Interstate Bancorp - Wikipedia

In 1928, Amadeo Giannini, born in California to Italian immigrant parents, formed a holding company, the Transamerica Corporation, to consolidate his existing financial ventures, which began business with en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Int…

$1,100,000,000 in assets and both banking and non-banking activities. From the 1930s through the mid-1950s, Transamerica made a number of acquisitions of banks and other financial corporations throughout the western United States, creating the framework for the later First

Interstate system.

In 1953, regulators succeeded in forcing the separation of Transamerica Corporation and Bank of America under the Clayton Antitrust Act.

During the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s Western Bancorporation operated in California under the UCB brand. In the early 1970s,

noticing Bank of America's (BofA) successful credit card BankAmericard, UCB decided to offer its own card which would be issued locally by individual banks under the name "Master Charge," Later, when BofA spun off its franchised credit card operations to a separate organization

named Visa International and changed the card's name to "Visa," UCB did the same thing, spinning off Master Charge to Master Card International and changing the name to MasterCard.

In October 1904, A.P. Giannini founded the Bank of Italy in San Francisco which later became known

as Bank of America. In 1928, Giannini put the bank into a holding company he named the Transamerica Corporation. In 1930, the company acquired Occidental Life Insurance Company, founded in 1906, and renamed it Transamerica Occidental Life Insurance Company.

Amadeo Pietro Giannini (Italian pronunciation: [amaˈdɛːo ˈpjɛːtro dʒanˈniːni]), also known as Amadeo Peter Giannini or A. P. Giannini (May 6, 1870 – June 3, 1949) was an American banker who founded the Bank of Italy, which became Bank of America.

Giannini founded the Bank of

Italy in San Francisco on October 17, 1904. The bank was housed in a converted saloon as an institution for the "little fellow". It was a new bank for the hardworking immigrants other banks would not serve.

The 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fires leveled much of the city.

In the face of widespread devastation, Giannini set up a temporary bank, collecting deposits, making loans, and proclaiming that San Francisco would rise from the ashes.

Immediately after the earthquake, but before the approaching fire burned the City, he moved the vault's money

to his home outside the fire zone in then-rural San Mateo, 18 miles (29 km) away. A garbage wagon was used to haul the money, hidden beneath garbage. The fires had heated the vaults of other big banks, so that the sudden temperature change from opening them risked destroying the

contents; many vaults were kept closed for weeks.

Bank of America, Los Angeles had been established in 1923 by Orra E. Monnette. Giannini began investing in the Bank of America, Los Angeles because conservative business leaders in Los Angeles were less receptive to the Bank of

Italy than San Franciscans had been.

Giannini helped nurture the motion picture and wine industries in California. He loaned Walt Disney the funds to produce Snow White, the first full-length, animated motion picture to be made in the US. During the Great Depression, he bought

the bonds that financed the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge.

During World War II, he bankrolled industrialist Henry Kaiser and his enterprises supporting the war effort. After the war, he visited Italy and arranged for loans to help rebuild the war-torn Fiat factories.

Giannini also provided capital to William Hewlett and David Packard to help form Hewlett-Packard.

Left: The founders of Fiat: 1. Luigi Damevino, 2. Cesare Goria Gatti, 3. Roberto Biscaretti di Ruffia, 4. Carlo Racca, 5. Emanuele Cacherano di Bricherasio, 6. Michele Ceriana

Mayneri, 7. Giovanni Agnelli, 8. Lodovico Scarfiotti, 9. Alfonso Ferrero.

On 11 July 1899, Giovanni Agnelli was part of the group of founding members of FIAT, Fabbrica Italiana di Automobili Torino.

During World War I, Agnelli became involved with the financier Riccardo Gualino

in transport of US aid to Europe in 1917. They invested in two enterprises in the United States; the Marine & Commerce Corporation of America exported coal and the International Shipbuilding Company made motorized vessels.

Riccardo Gualino (25 March 1879 – 6 June 1964) was an

Italian trader, financier and industrialist.

Gualino became involved in risky speculations with the French financier Albert Oustric.

Agnelli and Gualino made an attempt early in 1918 to take over Credito Italiano. This was the second largest of the four mixed banks in Italy

at the time, the others being the Banca Commerciale Italiana (Comit), Banca Italiana de Sconto (BIS) and Banco de Roma. These four dominated Italian finance and had stakes in a huge range of companies. Agnelli and Gualino did not succeed, but joined the board of directors of

Credito Italiano.

Banca Commerciale Italiana (COMIT), founded in 1894, was once one of the largest banks in Italy.

BCI's predecessor was the Società Generale di Credito Mobiliare, founded in 1862. This institution became successful as a lender to the iron and steel industry.

However, the Italian banking crisis of 1893–1894, led to Credito Mobiliare's failure. On 10 October 1894 Credito Mobiliare was re-established as a private joint-stock bank under the name Banca Commerciale Italiana with capital from several German and Austrian banks, including S.

Bleichröder, Deutsche Bank, and Dresdner Bank.

1939: BCI sold Banca Commerciale Italiana Trust Co. – New York to Manufacturers Trust Co..

In 1932, Manufacturers Trust created the National Hotel Management Company (NMH) to centrally oversee the hotels the bank held mortgages

on. They appointed hotel pioneer Ralph Hitz as President of the NMH. This was because, even at the height of the great depression, Hitz had been able to turn a profit at the New Yorker Hotel, which the Manufacturers Trust also held the mortgage for. By the time of Hitz's death in

1940, the NHM had become the largest hotel organization in the United States and managed the New Yorker, the Lexington and the Belmont Plaza hotels (New York); the Congress Hotel (Chicago); the Netherland Plaza (Cincinnati); Adolphus Hotel (Dallas); the Van Cleve (Dayton); the

Book-Cadillac (Detroit); the Nicollet Hotel (Minneapolis); The New York Municipal Airport Restaurants (New York) and the Eastern Slope Inn (North Conway, New Hampshire).
The National Hotel Management Company was dissolved within a month of Hitz's death in 1940.

Ralph Hitz (1 March 1891 - 12 January 1940) was a pioneer in the hotel industry, whose ideas for marketing and customer service became the industry standard for luxury lodging.

In 1936 Hitz published The Standard Practice Manuals for Hotel Operation, which covered every aspect

of what he believed needed to be done in order to operate a hotel successfully. Hitz was the first manager to create a customer database. In the days before computers, Hitz maintained file cabinets with information on the preferences of thousands of guests.

Hitz tracked

information about annual conventions for 3,000 organizations, and sent weekly bulletins to each of his hotels, and lobbied to have conventions booked in the cities where the NHM hotels were located.

Upon Giannini's death in 1949, his son Mario Giannini (1894–1952) assumed

leadership of the bank. Giannini's daughter, Claire Giannini Hoffman (1905–1997), took her father's seat on the bank's board of directors, where she remained until the 1980s.

Claire Giannini Hoffman (December 30, 1904 – December 20, 1997) was the first woman to serve on the

boards of Bank of America and Sears, Roebuck & Company.

Hoffman was a pioneer in women business opportunities and equal pay. For about 20 years she was the only woman guest invited at international bank conference events for the International Monetary Fund, the International

Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and the International Development Association.

Hoffman was sent to Geneva as U.S. delegate to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development in 1964. In 1965 President Lyndon Johnson asked her to be a director of the Export-Import

Bank of the United States. President Nixon appointed her to the Financial Investment Advisory Panel of Amtrak in 1970.

In 1973, Federal Reserve Board Chairman Arthur Burns and President Nixon asked Hoffman to become the governor of the Federal Reserve Board. A condition for the

position was that she had break her ties with Bank of America totally. She turned down the job.

The Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) was an international bank founded in 1972 by Agha Hasan Abedi, a Pakistani financier.

BCCI was created with capital of which 25%

was from the Bank of America and the remaining 75% from Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, the ruler of Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates.

William von Raab, a former U.S. Commissioner of Customs, also told the Kerry Committee that the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency held

"several" accounts at BCCI. According to a 1991 article in Time magazine, the National Security Council also had accounts at BCCI, which were used for a variety of covert operations, including transfers of money and weapons during the Iran–Contra affair.

In 1991, Robert Mueller

declared the government had been investigating BCCI since 1986 resulting in intense media coverage.

In 1992, United States Senators John Kerry and Hank Brown became the co-authors of a report on BCCI, which was delivered to the Committee on Foreign Relations.

The report found

that Clark Clifford and his legal/business partner Robert A. Altman had been closely involved with the bank from 1978, when they were introduced to BCCI by Bert Lance, the former director of the Office of Management and Budget, to 1991.

Clifford and Altman testified that they

had never observed any suspicious activity, and had themselves been deceived about BCCI's control of First American. However, the federal government and Robert Morgenthau, son of Xmas tree farmer Henry Morganthau Jr FDR & Eleanors neighbor in Fishkill NY and inspiration for Law

& Orders Adam Schiff, contended that the two men knew, or should have known, that BCCI controlled First American. Pharaon also was revealed to be the puppet controlling owner of CenTrust Bank in Miami, Florida.

CenTrust was one of the largest buyers of junk bonds (high yield

bonds) in the country, with over $1.4 billion on the bank's books at its peak. It was part of Drexel Burnham Lambert's "daisy chain" of junk bond buyers like Lincoln Savings in Irvine, Imperial Savings in San Diego, Gibraltar Savings in Simi Valley, Silverado Savings & Loan in

Denver, and Columbia Savings in Beverly Hills.

Dade Savings & Loan Association opened in 1934. In 1983, the failing thrift, with 32 branches and $2.2 billion in assets, was acquired by real estate developer David L. Paul for $32 million and the following year was renamed

CenTrust Savings & Loan Association.

The bank's headquarters were located in the newly built CenTrust Tower (now Miami Tower), a Miami landmark designed by I. M. Pei and featured in the opening credits of the television series "Miami Vice."

Paul was co-chairman of the

Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee with Senator John Kerry (D-MA), with CenTrust contributing $30,000 in political action funds to the committee. The committee also leased Paul's yacht for fund-raisers. Paul met with Kerry five times in 1988, while Kerry was investigating

BCCI for money laundering.

Robert Mueller III, the son of a DuPont executive, went to a Paul's in Concord NH, where he was John Kerry's lacrosse captain.

The Bill Barr & Bobby 3 Sticks families socialize together, their wives attend Bible study together, and the Muellers

were guests at the weddings of Barr’s daughters.

“I have known Bob Mueller personally and professionally for 30 years,” he told the Senate Judiciary Committee in January. “We worked closely together throughout my previous tenure at the Department of Justice under President Bush.

We’ve been friends since.”
When Barr served as attorney general under President George H. W. Bush in 1991 and 1992, Mueller was the assistant attorney general heading up the criminal division.

In 2005, Rod Rosenstein was asked by a local reporter from Maryland to name his role

models.
Rosenstein picked just one: Robert Mueller.
Mueller, then FBI director, had served as the top federal prosecutor in Massachusetts during the late 1980s. Rosenstein, as a young law student, landed an internship in Mueller’s Boston headquarters.

“I’ve been fortunate to

have many [role models] over the course of my career,” Rosenstein told The Daily Record. “One is [Robert S. Mueller III], the head of the FBI. My first job in law enforcement was as an intern in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Boston, when Mueller was the interim U.S. attorney up

there.”

King & Spalding's senior partners include Georgia's former US Senator and director of The Coca-Cola Company Sam Nunn.

United States Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein joined K&S D.C. Office as a partner in 2020.

The most troubling issue that FBI Director

Christopher Wray may face is the fact that his law firm — King & Spalding — represents Rosneft and Gazprom, two of Russia’s largest state-controlled oil companies.
Rosneft was prominently mentioned in the now infamous 35-page dossier prepared by former British MI6 agent

Christopher Steele. The dossier claims that the CEO of Rosneft, Igor Sechin, offered candidate Donald Trump, through Trump’s campaign advisor Carter Page, a 19% stake in the company in exchange for lifting U.S. sanctions on Russia. The dossier claims that the offer was made in

July while Page was in Moscow.
Rosneft is also the company that had a $500 billion oil drilling joint-venture with Exxon in 2012, when Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was Exxon’s CEO.

The law firm’s representation of Gazprom raises even more serious conflict issues for Wray.

Gazprom was a partner in RosUkrEnergo AG (“RUE”), which is controlled by Ukrainian oligarch Dmitry Firtash.

Firtash is also cited as having part ownership of SCL Group and thus Cambridge Analytica through various shell companies.

RosUkrEnergo, which has been the dominant

natural gas supplier to Ukraine since 2003 replacing the Hungarian registered Eural Trans Gas which replaced Itera beginning in late 2002, has Semion Mogilevich as a silent partner.

Gazprom, a Russian natural-gas extraction company, had asked Mogilevich to oversee natural-gas

deliveries from Russia to Ukraine via gas intermediary RosUkrEnergo. All parties deny connections with Mogilevich.

In February 2009, a number of agreements were negotiated between Russia and China that provided a 20-year contract for an annual supply of 15 million tons of oil

between the Chinese National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) and Rosneft, cooperation between CNPC and Transneft to construct and operate a branch of the Eastern Siberia–Pacific Ocean (ESPO) oil pipeline to China, and the provision of loans for US$25 billion—US$15 billion from

Rosneft and US$10 billion from Transneft—by the China Development Bank on the security of supplies.

There is a plan to lay a parallel Yakutia–Khabarovsk–Vladivostok gas pipeline alongside the oil pipeline.

On 29 October 2012, Russian president Vladimir Putin instructed

Alexey Miller, CEO of Gazprom to start the construction of the pipeline. The Yakutia–Khabarovsk–Vladivostok pipeline project was officially renamed Power of Siberia at the end of 2012.

Alexey Miller and Head of the China National Petroleum Company Zhou Jiping signed a $400

billion gas deal for natural gas supplies via the Eastern Route between Gazprom and CNPC, 21 May 2014

From 1996 to 1999, Miller was Director for Development and Investments of the Port of Saint Petersburg. From 1999 to 2000, he served as Director General of the.

Baltic Pipeline System.

In 2000, he was appointed Deputy Minister of Energy of the Russian Federation, and since 2001 he has served as Chairman of the Management Committee of Gazprom.

The Baltic Pipeline System (BPS) is a Russian oil transport system operated by the oil

pipeline company Transneft.

Joint Stock Company Transneft (Russian: Транснефть) is a state-controlled pipeline transport company headquartered in Moscow, Russia. It is the largest oil pipeline company in the world. Transneft is operating over 70,000 kilometres (43,000 mi) of

trunk pipelines and transports about 80% of oil and 30% of oil products produced in Russia.The company is led by Nikolay Tokarev.

Nikolay Tokarev was a KGB officer in East Germany, where he met and allied with KGB officers Vladimir Putin and Sergey Chemezov who were living in

Dresden under their KGB boss Lazar Matveev.

In 2011, Chemezov, Makarov, and Alexei Miller, chairman of Gazprom, were the supervisory board of Team Katyusha (Russian: Катюша), which was formed in 2008, and, along with Novikombank (Russian: ЗАО АКБ «НОВИКОМБАНК») and

Transneft (Russian: ОАО «АК «Транснефть»), their companies, Rostec, ITERA, and Gazprom, respectively, were the major sponsors of Katyusha.

Katusha–Alpecin (Russian: Катюша, UCI team code: TKA) was a Russian (later Swiss) road bicycle racing team which competed at the UCI

WorldTeam level using Canyon bikes.

The team was created in 2008 by Igor Makarov within the framework of the previously established Russian Global Cycling Project.

Igor Viktorovich Makarov (born 5 April 1962) is the President of ARETI International Group (formerly known as

ITERA International Group).

ARETI International Group of Companies is controlled by Russian businessman Igor Makarov and his Turkmani partner Valery Otchertsov (Russian: Валерий Отчерцов) through offshore holding companies registered in Cyprus, Virgin Islands, Curacao, and the

Netherlands and has subsidiaries involved in the energy industry, civil and industrial engineering, and finance and insurance.

With financial support from the Israeli-Canadian billionaire Sylvan Adams, the Makarov backed Swiss-based Katusha–Alpecin was taken over by the Israel

Cycling Academy.

Adams was born and raised in Canada. He served for close to 25 years as president and CEO of Iberville Developments, one of Canada's largest real-estate development companies founded by his father, Marcel.

Marcel Abramovich (later Adams) was born to a Jewish

family in Romania in 1920. His father was a tanner. During World War II he was forced to work in Nazi labor camps (1941-1944).

In 1953, he married Annie Adams; they had four children: Julian, Sylvan, Linda, and Leora. His son Julian is a biochemist who led a team that developed

the drug Velcade.

Bortezomib was originally made in 1995 at Myogenics. The drug (PS-341) was tested in a small Phase I clinical trial on people with multiple myeloma. It was brought to further clinical trials by Millennium Pharmaceuticals in October 1999.
In May 2003, seven

years after the initial synthesis, bortezomib (marketed as Velcade by Millennium Pharmaceuticals Inc.) was approved in the United States by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for use in multiple myeloma, based on the results from the SUMMIT Phase II trial.

Takeda Oncology

(originally Millennium Pharmaceuticals) is a biopharmaceutical company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It is a fully owned subsidiary of Takeda Pharmaceutical.

Millennium was founded by Mark J. Levin, CEO, in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1993.

In May 2008, Takeda

Pharmaceutical Company Limited purchased Millennium for $8.8 billion.

The Takeda Pharmaceutical Company Limited[1] (武田薬品工業株式会社, Takeda Yakuhin Kōgyō kabushiki gaisha) [takeꜜda jakɯçiŋ koꜜːɡʲoː] is a Japanese multinational pharmaceutical company, with partial

American and British roots.

Takeda Pharmaceuticals was founded in 1781, and was incorporated on January 29, 1925.

In January 2020, Takeda announced a research partnership with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to advance discoveries in artificial intelligence and

health. The MIT-Takeda Program is housed in the MIT Jameel Clinic, and is led by Professor James J. Collins, with a steering committee led by Professor Anantha P. Chandrakasan, dean of the MIT School of Engineering, and Anne Heatherington, senior vice president and head of

Data Sciences Institute (DSI) at Takeda.

Collins is also a core founding faculty member of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University and an Institute Member of the Broad Institute at MIT and Harvard. Collins is also faculty lead for life

sciences at the MIT Jameel Clinic since 2018.

The MIT Abdul Latif Jameel Clinic for Machine Learning in Health (commonly, MIT Jameel Clinic; previously, J-Clinic) is a research center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the field of artificial intelligence (AI)

and health sciences, including disease detection, drug discovery, and the development of medical devices. The MIT Jameel Clinic also supports the commercialization of solutions through grant funding, and has partnered with pharmaceutical companies, like Takeda and Sanofi, to

forge collaborations between research and development functions and MIT researchers.

Co-founded in 2018 by MIT and Community Jameel, the MIT Jameel Clinic is housed in the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing.

The MIT Schwarzman College of Computing is named after The

Blackstone Group chairman Stephen A. Schwarzman.

Abdul Latif Jameel is a family-owned diversified business founded in Saudi Arabia in 1945 by the late Sheikh Abdul Latif Jameel (1909–1993).