Household HSBC Watch

NYSE Chairman Marshall Carter, along with the rest of the NYSE board, its Chief Executive John Thain and several Goldman Sachs (nyse: GS - news - people ) bankers are slated to testify regarding the New York Stock Exchange merger and its restructuring.

Carter said in an Oct. 12 deposition that Citibank contacted the NYSE on April 1–three weeks before the Big Board announced its plans to merge with Archipelago. Merrill Lynch contacted the Exchange twice, once before Carter took over as chairman on April 7 and once after.

These contacts are in addition to a preliminary proposal made by telephone June 30 by a group of private equity firms including Bain Capital, Blackstone Partners and Texas Pacific Group, Carter said. The pitch by their investment banker, HSBC (nyse: HBC - news - people ), was “seriously flawed,” Carter said in the transcript.

For example, he said, HSBC’s pitch was a “set of assumptions,” including the layoff of 800 people, the closing of NYSE’s trading floor by 2008, the development of its own electronic communications network, and the full spin off of the NYSE regulatory arm.

Carter said he called the chairman of Blackstone afterward and told him the actions were “hostile,” and noted that Thain called HSBC’s chairman and told him the same thing.

Meanwhile, the Citi and Merrill pitches were more like “cold calls” from investment-banking salespeople trying to drum up business, Carter said. Each proposal was taken to the board.