Bank of America (BofA) cut short an online event earlier in the week and apologized, after clients accused it of promoting “Moscow’s talking points,” according to the Financial Times.
Some attendees were aggrieved by criticisms of Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky and a description of the economic damage his country has suffered, and raised their complaints during the conference, the British newspaper reported on Thursday.
The two-day BofA conference on geopolitics kicked off on Tuesday, but the organizers canceled three sessions discussing US sanctions against Russia and relations between Washington and Moscow, the paper said. A bank strategist phoned clients to apologize for what they heard during the first day, sources told the outlet.
Two speakers were named as supposedly creating an anti-Ukraine tone. Daniel Sheehan, BofA Securities’ senior vice-president for international relations, reportedly referred to President Zelensky “a master manipulator and mimic” and claimed the US government had “serious concerns” about him. A BofA spokesperson told the FT that Sheehan was explaining the views of other people about the Ukrainian leader, and not his own.
Nicolai Petro, professor of political science at the University of Rhode Island, was also identified as having objectionable views. Petro is a scholar of the Soviet Union and Russia, who recently authored a book titled ‘The Tragedy of Ukraine: What Classical Greek Tragedy Can Teach Us About Conflict Resolution.’
His prepared speech, which he shared with the FT, described Ukraine as “the overwhelming loser” in the conflict, due to the economic and demographic damage it has sustained.
“If this is what Russia meant by removing Ukraine’s capacity to wage war against Russia, then it will arguably have won,” he said.
Petro raised Kiev’s intention to become an agricultural superpower as “recommended by the EU and the United States” and argued that Washington’s interest was to prolong the hostilities, since it benefited from a “dramatic increase in EU energy and military dependence on the US.”
The newspaper did not identify critics of the event, except for Timothy Ash of BlueBay Asset Management, who had previously expressed his displeasure publicly. In a tweet on Wednesday, he stated that US banks engaged speakers “who so often roll thru Moscow’s talking points.”
An anonymous critic told FT that the conference “was more like Bank of Russia than Bank of America” and “overwhelmingly pro-Russian.” Another one called Petro’s remarks “absolutely shocking [and] straight out of the foreign ministry of Russia”.