Household HSBC Watch

June 20, 2005 — CitiFinancial will close an Owings Mills, Maryland center that handles loan defaults and has about 110 employees. The layoffs - scheduled for the last two weeks of July, according to Maryland Department of Labor, Licensing and Regulation - follow the closing last year of a back-office support center with 116 workers in Hanover, Maryland. The jobs were consolidated at centers in Charlotte, N.C., Dallas and Phoenix. But where’s the customers’ data? Although the Ohio AG’s office does not have as much enforcement power with financial institutions as it does retailers, Ohio AG Petro said, “We’ll be rattling the cage of Citigroup in the same way” it did DSW (a store in Ohio that sells, among other things, shoes). We’ll see. Petro’s office has received 116 complaints against Citigroup, most of them against CitiFinancial, since 2000…