UMB, a venerable Kansas City bank, facing claims of discrimination, lost artwork
A former high-ranking UMB Bank official claims she was fired last year for calling out discriminatory practices at the Kansas City financial institution, including directives to “manage out” older employees and allegations of crude behavior by top executives.
Dana Abraham, president of private wealth management at UMB Bank before her termination in April 2019, alleges she was “subjected to an increasingly hostile environment toward women and older employees” in a complaint filed with the Missouri Commission on Human Rights (MCHR).
Abraham sued the bank in September for not adequately revealing the reason why UMB fired her in a service letter. In a response filed in Jackson County Circuit Court, UMB lawyers included a copy of Abraham’s complaint to the MCHR, which details her allegations of discrimination and retaliation.
Her complaint, not previously reported, alleges that UMB president Jim Rine showed her a picture on his phone of a penis and a bottle of wine and that Rine referred to another employee’s beard as a “pussy on his face.” The complaint also alleges that UMB chairman Mariner Kemper chased and tackled onto a sofa the woman who headed the bank’s human resources department.
In a court filing, the bank denies Abraham’s claims, calling them “replete with salacious and patently false allegations regarding specific UMB employees that are completely unrelated to the termination of her employment or the actual performance issues that give rise to her termination.”
In a statement to The Star, UMB said Abraham’s “baseless” allegations were made in an administrative process — a complaint to the Missouri Commission on Human Rights — and closed with “no findings.”
“The efforts by Ms. Abraham to misrepresent and harm our company and its leadership within the administrative filing are unfortunate and are clearly the contentions of a disgruntled former employee,” the bank said. “UMB will not dignify Ms. Abraham’s allegations with a response, other than to say that we will vigorously defend against any claims brought against UMB by Ms. Abraham.”
The MCHR, however, did issue notice of a right to sue, which means Abraham could add claims of discrimination and retaliation to her lawsuit. In a filing, UMB’s lawyers signaled that they anticipate her doing so.
Abraham’s lawyer, Mike Blumenthal, declined to comment on the case.
Abraham’s lawsuit preceded another last month filed by heirs of the late Kansas City artist Thomas Hart Benton. It accuses UMB of mismanaging the Benton estate’s property, for which it was assigned the trustee, including being unable to account for more than 100 pieces of artwork. UMB called those allegations “misguided.”
Abraham’s complaint touches on another disclosure about UMB: The bank a year ago was forced to write off a $48.1 million loan to a factoring company that went into bankruptcy. The write-off caused the bank to disclose to investors that it had “identified a material weakness in internal control” related to personnel it had assigned to its relationship with the bankrupt customer.
In a conference call with investors a year ago, Kemper said he believed the loan write-off was an isolated incident and not related to underwriting issues at UMB.
While the allegations in the Benton and Abraham lawsuits have yet to be tested for their veracity in court, they represent unusually critical and public disclosures against a bank that has generally enjoyed a pristine reputation in Kansas City and beyond, due in part to its association with the Kemper family that chartered the institution more than a century ago.
Abraham’s ascension
Abraham joined UMB in 2005 with 19 years of banking experience, including time at Bank of America. She earned a degree in business administration from the University of Louisiana — Monroe and lives in Overland Park.
In a press release announcing her hiring as senior vice president of private banking, a UMB executive at the time lauded her for “extensive private banking and leadership experience.”
From there, Abraham enjoyed promotions and positive evaluations for her work in the private wealth and personal banking divisions of UMB bank.
By Abraham’s account in the MCHR complaint, her time at UMB was successful.
She was referred to as a “brand ambassador” for UMB and received plaudits in the financial press, cited in 2011 by the Kansas City Business Journal as a “Woman Who Means Business” and in 2018 as one of The American Banker’s “Women to Watch.”
Abraham’s account is at least partially supported by the service letter Rine sent to her after her termination, which said she “generally met the expectations of UMB.” The letter said Abraham’s manager evaluation ratings ranged from 3.25 to 3.93; a score of 3 denotes meeting expectations while 4 means exceeding them.
In October 2018, Abraham became president of private wealth management. On April 13, 2019, UMB fired her. Rine’s letter says only that her work in that role did not meet UMB’s expectations and she was “terminated for unsatisfactory job performance.”
Desert Artist
In her MCHR complaint, Abraham said the stated reason for her firing was failure to “escalate sooner” to bank chairman Mariner Kemper the litigation risk posed by the Benton trust matter.
UMB was named trustee for family trusts for Benton after he and his wife Rita died within a few months of each other in 1975. The trusts included stocks, cash, real estate and hundreds of works by Benton and other prominent artists, reportedly valued in the millions of dollars.
In December, Benton’s daughter Jessie Benton and other family members sued UMB in Jackson County probate court, alleging missteps in the bank’s handling of the estate. Their claims include incomplete inventories of artwork and a failure to account for several pieces.
UMB is also accused of selling some Benton artwork for prices below their value and gifting other pieces without authorization.
One example cited in the lawsuit is a Benton piece called Desert Artist, shown as gifted to the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art by the late UMB executive Crosby Kemper, Jr., and his wife. Benton’s will, the family said, ordered its distribution to the Nelson Gallery Foundation, now the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.
However, Breeze Richardson, director of marketing and communications for the Kemper Museum, said the Nelson-Atkins originally owned Desert Artist and later decided to sell it.
“The commercial gallery that handled the transaction then sold it to Bebe and Crosby Kemper Jr., who in turn donated it to Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in 2000,” Richardson said in an email to The Star. “These facts concerning the provenance of the painting should put to rest any speculation about how it was acquired by Kemper Museum.”
The Star asked the Nelson-Atkins Museum about the matter, but a spokeswoman did not have a comment by press time.
Desert Artist was referenced in a 1991 column in The Star, by art writer Fred McCraw, describing the piece as part of a collection in Benton’s testamentary bequest to the Nelson-Atkins Museum.
Andre Boyda, a North Kansas City lawyer representing the Benton family, said Benton’s will bequeathed Desert Artist to the Nelson-Atkins Museum and as trustees, UMB had no power to change that.
“My question is how did it get to the gallery when it was bequested to the Nelson?” Boyda said.
UMB, when asked about the Benton matter, said it would not litigate the case through the press and said Benton’s legacy was important to the bank.
“The efforts by the lawyers to malign our decades-long relationship with the Bentons through inflammatory allegations raises serious ethical issues and is not in keeping with the high regard we have for Mr. Benton and his family,” UMB said in a statement. “The facts are simply not as they are being portrayed by these lawyers.”
Even so, Abraham believed that the explanation that the Benton litigation was the reason for her dismissal was pretext and retaliation for her “ongoing opposition to the sex-based and ageist conduct of Mr. Kemper and Mr. Rine.”
Abraham said in November 2018 she proposed monthly or quarterly meetings with Kemper and Rine to discuss risk-rated accounts, and that others at the bank knew about the escalated risk regarding the Benton matter as far back as May 2018.
The $48 million loan
In 2018, Abraham was eligible for a performance bonus for 2018, according to her MCHR complaint. She claimed that bank executives were told bonuses would be reduced because UMB had to charge off a $48 million loan it made to a factoring company.
Factoring is a business that buys invoices from other companies, often to provide immediate capital to companies with cash-flow issues. A charge off is an accounting term for a debt that probably can’t be collected.
In a 2018 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, UMB disclosed they had to write down the $48.1 million loan because the factoring company, which was not named, was going bankrupt.
The charge off “significantly impacted” UMB’s fourth quarter earnings in 2018, Kemper told analysts.
“Again, while we believe this was an isolated incident, it is understandably the headline for the quarter,” Kemper told analysts on a conference call, according to a transcript of the discussion. “On a personal note, I am deeply disappointed with a result that doesn’t live up to the standards we have set for ourselves as excellent risk managers. We will use this event as an opportunity to learn and improve.”
In an SEC filing, UMB said that a review of its factoring loan portfolio by its chief risk officer turned up no other impaired loans.
In her complaint to the MCHR, Abraham alleged that Rine was “responsible for the significant loss to the bank” since the $48 million loan came from the bank’s commercial division, which had been under Rine’s leadership. Rine received a larger performance bonus than Abraham, she claims.
This story was originally published January 5, 2020 at 5:00 AM with the headline "UMB, a venerable Kansas City bank, facing claims of discrimination, lost artwork."
