At the annual gathering of Berkshire Hathaway?s investors here this weekend, Warren Buffett made it clear that, as far as he is concerned, it?s back to business as usual. But a former top manager for him, David Sokol, may make that a difficult goal to accomplish.
Buffett said at a news conference on Sunday that while he viewed the controversy caused by Sokol?s abrupt departure a month ago as sad, he saw little reason to dwell on the matter for very long. ?I?ve got no strong feelings about it, except that it?s a very sad situation,? he said. He said he planned no major changes to Berkshire?s management practices, which largely leave the executives of the company?s subsidiaries to operate as they please. With more than 260,000 employees working for him around the world, something can and will inevitably go wrong, Buffett said.
His longtime investing partner, Berkshire?s vice chairman, Charles Munger, addressed the issue more bluntly. ?We?ve had a close brush with scandal two times in 50 years,? he said on Sunday. ?We?re not going to devote a lot of time to this.? Nevertheless, Sokol appears ready to keep the issue alive and wage a fight against Berkshire and his onetime boss. In a statement issued after Berkshire?s annual meeting, Sokol?s lawyer insisted that Buffett was ?transparently scapegoating? his client, and that Sokol had not violated company policy with those trades.
Buffett already used the annual meeting on Saturday, attended by tens of thousands of ardent investors from around the world, to speak at length about what he knew of Sokol?s stock purchases in a chemical maker that he later recommended to Buffett as a potential acquisition. Berkshire announced in March that it would buy the chemical producer, Lubrizol, for $9 billion. The deal produced a $3 million paper profit for Sokol.