More than a month after winning a proxy contest involving Quigley Corp., Ted Karkus has now been named chief executive officer of the Doylestown maker of Cold-Eeze cold remedies.

Karkus, a New York investor, successfully led an effort to replace the entire board of Quigley this spring. That victory led company founder Guy Quigley to resign. Karkus had been interim CEO since June 12; he's also chairman of the board.

As CEO, Karkus will earn a salary of $750,000, plus benefits.

The company also hired a chief operating officer, Robert V. Cuddihy Jr. Most recently, he's been the president of a New York City-area company that advises on financial restructuring and mergers. Cuddihy had been chief financial officer of iDNA Inc., a New York strategic communications and technology firm, for eight years.

Cuddihy's salary will be $275,000. He also will receive an annual grant of $50,000 in Quigley common stock.

A statement released by the company this morning says that Quigley has cut overall annual payroll expense by about $1.75 million, even after hiring Karkus and Cuddihy. That was accomplished by "recent resignations of senior executives and further reductions of head count."

In trading early today, Quigley shares were down 7.5 cents, or 2.3 percent, to $3.18.

Kulicke & Soffa Industries Inc.'s loss is Actel Corp.'s gain.

Maurice E. Carson had been chief financial officer of Kulicke & Soffa, a Fort Washington-based maker of semiconductor assembly equipment for nearly six years. On Monday evening, the company said he was resigning to take a position with a semiconductor company in Northern California.

This morning, Mountain View, Calif.-based Actel said Carson, 52, will join at its executive vice president and CFO as of Aug. 17. Actel's previous CFO died unexpectedly Dec. 22 from medical complications following a hospitalization.

Actel lost $11.7 million, or 45 cents per share, on revenues of $218 million in its most recent fiscal year.

Under terms of his employment agreement with Actel, Carson will receive an annual salary of $332,000 and a bonus of 40 percent of the base salary he earns for the rest of 2009 and 25 percent of the base salary he earns in 2010. He also gets an $85,000 signing bonus and will be granted stock appreciation rights to buy 160,000 shares of Actel common stock.

It's interesting that Carson earned a salary of $325,320 during Kulicke & Soffa's 2008 fiscal year. Starting in February, the base salaries for Kulicke & Soffa's top management were reduced, including a 15 percent cut for Carson, as the company cut costs to deal with the global recession. That restructuring has included a round of 240 job cuts announced in November and another round of 215 job cuts announced in February.

Kulicke & Soffa named Michael J. Morris its interim CFO. Morris, 40, has been treasurer since 2006.

After billions of federal dollars showered on bank bailouts, many small-business owners question whether it’s done any good.

For them, access to credit often remains elusive, and the ailing economy only adds to the financial pressure. Recessions are color-blind, but that’s cold comfort to minority-owned businesses that also have had their credit lines trimmed or loan applications denied.

The Entrepreneurs Forum of Greater Philadelphia will try to help minority-owned businesses learn how they can get funding at a July 14 meeting that will be held at the group’s usual gathering spot, the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia.

Unlike most of the forum’s meetings, the Fed actually will play a role. Philadelphia Fed president Charles I. Plosser will introduce a panel of experts that includes two from minority-controlled banks, City National Bank and United Bank of Philadelphia.

This free event will be held at the Fed, Seventh and Arch Streets, from 5:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m.

If you go, you must register in order to get into the Federal Reserve Bank. You can do that by sending an e-mail to info@efgp.org or by calling 215-640-3339.

From Rohm to rum

Jacques Croisetiere will trade a Philadelphia office for one in Bermuda next month, when he becomes the chief financial officer for Bacardi Ltd.

Croisetiere is the former CFO of Rohm & Haas Co., the specialty-chemical maker acquired by Dow Chemical Co. on April 1. He had been CFO at Rohm & Haas since 2003.

Bacardi, of Hamilton, Bermuda, is the privately held distiller of rum, Grey Goose vodka, and other liquor.

The departure of Croisetiere, 55, leaves just one of the three members of Rohm & Haas’ former “Chairman’s Committee” still guiding what has become Dow’s Advanced Materials Division. That would be Pierre R. Brondeau, its president and CEO.

Former Rohm & Haas CEO Raj Gupta retired after Dow Chemical completed its purchase.

The former chief financial officer of Rohm & Haas Co. has been hired as CFO of Bacardi Ltd. , the privately held maker of rum and other liquor.

Jacques Croisetiere, 55, will join the Bermuda-based company Aug. 3. He succeeds Ralph Morera, who is retiring.

Croisetiere had been at Philadelphia's Rohm & Haas for 10 years, serving as CFO since 2003. He was one of three executives that formed the "Chairman's Committee" at the specialty chemical maker, which was acquired earlier this year by Dow Chemical Co.

(The others on that committee were former Rohm & Haas CEO Raj Gupta and Pierre R. Brondeau, who is currently president and CEO of Dow's Advanced Materials Division, which consists mostly of the Rohm & Haas operations.)

Bacardi said that Croisetiere's appointment will become effective at its July 9th annual general meeting.

And yes, this means that Croisetiere will be based in Bacardi's headquarters in Hamilton, Bermuda. Think he'll miss Philadelphia winters?

After losing its board seat last week, Terence W. Edwards has stepped down as president and CEO of PHH Corp.

The Mount Laurel residential mortgage originator said today that George J. Kilroy has been named acting CEO and president and James O. Egan the new chairman. All changes took effect on June 17.

Kilroy, 61, had been president and CEO of PHH Arval, the company's fleet management services business.

Edwards, 53, will remain an advisor to PHH for up to six months. The company said the board has begun a search for a permanent CEO and will consider internal and external candidates.

PHH faced a proxy battle waged by its largest shareholder, Pennant Capital Management L.L.C., this spring. Two of Pennant's candidates were elected to the PHH board at the annual shareholder's meeting on June 10. Both Edwards and PHH's nonexecutive chairman, A.B. Krongard, were defeated.

Pennant has been pushing for changes at PHH, which lost $254 million, or $4.68 per share, on revenues of $2.06 billion last year. In trading early Friday, PHH shares were up 79 cents at $17.33.

Kevin M. Blakely started as CEO of the Center City-based Risk Management Association just before the subprime-mortgage turbulence had graduated to crisis status.

In an interview in July 2007, he said that banks had “come a long way in developing new methods of modeling risk, but we haven’t been through a major business cycle yet when these methods have been tested.”

Well, now, we have. After the hundreds of billions spent on bank bailouts, you probably know how effective those methods were.

Many banks and other organizations were not investing in risk management the way that they should been, Blakely said yesterday.

And those computer models? “They’ve taken a real beating,” he said. “But they’re created by human beings and are based on assumptions made by human beings.”

What got lost in the chase for revenues and profits was that human element. “We made models out to be the be-all and end-all of risk management. We lost sight of the human judgment needed and the subjective decisions that are necessary,” he said.

Now a renewed emphasis on risk management is in vogue, and so are chief risk officers, such as Blakely, who’d spent more than a decade as one at KeyCorp in Cleveland.

On Wednesday, Huntington Bancshares Inc., of Columbus, Ohio, announced that Blakely would become its new chief risk officer in early July.

For this next hurrah, he can thank his long involvement in the small but influential Philadelphia nonprofit that he’s run for nearly two years. Blakely, 58, had served as a board member of RMA from 2000 to 2002 with Stephen D. Steinour, the former CEO of Citizens Financial Group.

In January, Steinour became CEO of Huntington Bancshares, which tapped $1.4 billion in capital through the Treasury Department’s Troubled Asset Relief Program last fall. Blakely said Steinour called him after Huntington’s chief risk officer indicated he wanted to leave for family reasons.
 

Marvin Samson had wanted to be a pharmacist, but he couldn’t afford to go to pharmacy school.

Instead, he went to Temple University at night to get his bachelor’s in chemistry. Samson went on to start two generic injectable drug manufacturers that were eventually acquired by bigger firms.

The first was Elkins-Sinn Inc. in 1967. Now owned by Baxter Healthcare Inc., the business remains one of the biggest U.S. makers of generic injectables.

The second was Cherry Hill’s Marsam Pharmaceuticals Inc. in 1985. It was bought by Schein Pharmaceuticals Inc. in 1995 for $240 million.

Once unable to afford pharmacy school, Samson, through his business success, was able to make charitable gifts to support them, including helping the nation’s oldest, the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy, improve its West Philadelphia campus.

As he puts it, he’s gotten to live the American dream - twice. That’s not to suggest he’s retired. He runs Samson Medical Technologies L.L.C. and serves on the boards of several companies, as well as the University of the Sciences in Philadelphia.

Sometime this fall, the University of the Sciences will honor Samson’s dedication by renaming its College of Health Sciences after him.

He called having his name on one of the university’s five colleges the “greatest honor of my life.” Samson would not say how much he’s donated to the university. “To me, giving is a private and personal thing,” he said.

Spokesman Brian Kirschner would say only that Samson has been one of the university’s “lifetime donors” for years. That designation means a donor has given more than $1 million.

The Samson College of Health Sciences, which offers majors in occupational therapy and physical therapy, will be the third college at the University of the Sciences to bear an individual’s name.

The Misher College of Arts and Sciences was renamed in 2000 for Allen Misher, the university’s president from 1983 through 1994.

The Mayes College of Healthcare Business and Policy, dedicated in May 2008, is named for Kathleen Mayes, who started Applied Clinical Communications Inc., of Parsippany, N.J., in 1991. She sold it to UnitedHealth Group Inc. in 2000.

Note: An earlier version of this posting had the incorrect purchase price of Marsam by Schein Pharmaceuticals.

As fragile as glass is, the “glass ceiling” has shown distressing durability since the term was coined in the mid-’80s.

Most surveys reflect the glacial pace of change for women attaining the upper ranks of management in the nation’s biggest corporations. Only 15 of the CEOs of the Fortune 500 are women.

But the picture is changing in the boardroom.

Directors & Boards magazine, published in Philadelphia, has been tracking appointments to boards of directors for 15 years. In the last two years, one-quarter of the new board members have been women, according to editor James Kristie.

And for the first quarter of 2009? Thirty-eight percent of new independent directors were women - the highest percentage the magazine’s quarterly survey has seen.

In fact, the annual average tended to be in the teens until the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley corporate-governance law in 2002, according to Kristie.

That was when the stock exchanges began requiring their listed companies to add more independent directors. Is there any bigger pool of potential directors than women executives?

In the first three months of 2009, women were named to fill 38 of the 101 seats on the corporate boards tracked by Directors & Boards. Those companies range from huge (Microsoft Corp., which added Maria Klawe, president of Harvey Mudd College) to tiny (Met-Pro Corp., which tapped Judith Spires, president of Acme Markets Inc.).

Quotable

If we just look at the offer, we have the Treasury and the UAW forgiving $20 billion of debt and getting 89 percent of ownership, and the bondholders are forgiving $27 billion and getting 10 percent ownership. If anyone thinks that’s fair, they’re not a GM bondholder.

- Mark Modica, a business manager at a Saturn dealership in Chalfont and General Motors bondholder, during a Bloomberg Television interview about the terms of the U.S. government’s reorganization plan for the automaker.
 

Here are the results from the SIFE USA National Exposition, held in Philadelphia this week.

The 137 teams from around the nation were whittled down to a Final Four in the four-year college division. Winners were announced Tuesday evening.

The 2009 winner was Flagler College, St. Augustine, Fla., which will represent the United States at SIFE's "World Cup" in Berlin in October.

According to Flagler's news release on the win, this is the second time it's won the national championship. It won in 2004.

The Flagler's SIFE team worked on about 20 projects, including the creating of an ethics training video for the 9,000 employees and franchise owners of Winmark Corp., a Minneapolis, Minn. company that operates retail chains features used merchandise, such as Play It Again Sports. Another project was a "success skills" and financial literacy program for Nepalese refugees living in the United States.

Here are the runners-up:

1. Drury University, Springfield, Mo.

2. La Sierra University, Riverside, Calif.

3. John Brown University, Siloam Springs, Ark.

The winner chosen from the 2-year colleges was Central Texas College, Killeen, Texas.

Here is a link to SIFE's Web site with all of the results.