What's In A Naming Right?
MayorBob.
Posted to Business on Tue Sep 16, 2008 at 06:27:23 AM EST (promoted by port1080). RSS.
Two National Football League clubs, the Giants and the Jets call Giant Stadium in the Meadowlands home. They will still be sharing a home stadium when Giant Stadium is replaced by a new stadium in 2010. What to call it is creating a major stir up in New York these days. No, it's not going to be a toss between Giant or Jets Stadium. The controversy surrounds the result of naming rights negotiations with a major insurance company. On the one hand you have those who are upset that a company which used to insure the Auschwitz concentration camp might end up on the side of the building. Then there are those who say, hasn't enough time passed since that unpleasantness?
Allianz of America is the insurance holding company that negotiated with the New Meadowlands Stadium Corporation (NMSC) for the naming rights to the (US)$1.3 billion, 82,000-seat facility (pdf doc). Like most recent stadium deals, the stadium is getting built through a combination of state and private money. The NMSC hoped to get $20 to $30 million per year from Allianz. The problem is that it turns out the parent of the American company has a bit of a checkered past. More than six decades before, the parent company Allianz was into insuring German properties. Two of its major contracts covered facilities and personnel at Dachau and Auschwitz. And, its CEO also served as Hitler's economics minister.
The company was never as closely tied to Nazi fortunes as VW or Krupp, but Allianz spent a good bit of time following WWII dodging any responsibility for much of what it was involved in. True enough, the company did finally agree to restitution of slave labor and death camp victims. It also agreed to open up inquiries into its history and opened an exhibition which examines this past. Peter Lefkin, a vice president at Allianz of America, said the company's "record of trying to redress the evils of the Third Reich have been significant over the years." Rabbi Jay Rosenbaum of the North American Board of Rabbis concurs with that:"I have found Allianz to be receptive, to be sensitive and a friend of the Jewish people today. We need not live in the past."
Needless to say, not everyone shares Lefken's or Rosenbaum's feelings. The Anti-Defamation League certainly doesn't; it called the notion of using Allianz's name on the stadium "inappropriate and an insult to the memory of Holocaust victims." Elan Steinberg, an official with a Holocaust survivor organization, said the NMSC must show a little sensitivity. Considering the fact so many survivors live in the New York metropolitan area, "it would not be appropriate to affix the Allianz name to a stadium name" in that area. The NMSC says they have done a "rigorous due diligence effort" to understand the concerns and they and the teams ownerships were "sensitive to Allianz's history." Still, at the end of the day all of this wasn't enough - last Saturday the NMSC backed out of talks with Allianz, and will be seeking new sponsorship for the stadium.
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