Buffett: Warren Buffett, to his credit, drove right into the David Sokol affair. Earlier, at the Berkshire Hathaway annual shareholders meeting on Saturday, the Oracle of Omaha compared his one-time deputy’s dealing in Lubrizol shares to the scandal that rocked Salomon Brothers two decades ago. Buffett called both events “inexcusable” and “inexplicable.” Yet, he overlooked the more significant link to the Wall Street bank he once partly owned and led as chairman. The rogue trading at Salomon exposed poor controls.
Buffett’s long-time investing partner, Charlie Munger, at least diagnosed part of the problem. He told the packed Qwest Center in Omaha, Nebraska, that hubris can sometimes cause irrational behavior. It probably wasn’t his intention, but he could easily have been describing some of his boss’s actions, too, including praising Sokol in the press release that disclosed his executive’s dodgy trades and resignation. Buffett, at the time, said nothing of the glaring violations of Berkshire’s codes of conduct and went out of his way to say he didn’t believe any law had been broken.
What’s inexplicable is why Buffett didn’t disclose more when alerting the world to the trouble at Berkshire. And still, he seemed unwilling, or unable to dwell on his own failings when addressing Berkshire shareholders. He pleaded guilty for not expressing any outrage and joked that Munger would be left in charge of future press releases.
But, Buffett nevertheless stumbled on to something, whether he knew it or not. Evoking Salomon Brothers was right on the nose. Paul Mozer’s violation of Treasury trading rules was only a major symptom of a bigger internal ailment, which led all the way to the top of the investment bank. Buffett and Munger would learn belatedly, for example, that the senior management, including boss John Gutfreund, had neglected to inform the board and regulators about the full extent of the trading misdeeds.
Sokol’s actions don’t seem to be exposing anything quite so sinister at Berkshire. In fact, it is generally, and rightly, admired for a strong ethical focus. But this recent blind spot, along with an audit committee report about it, reveals a lack of appropriate governance and controls nonetheless. The whole handling of the Sokol affair suggests that if Buffett were to reflect a little further on his time on Wall Street, he might yet have more to learn from it. And by doing so, he would pass along an even better Berkshire to his successors.