He had a way of extricating himself, and his clients, from tight spots.
Most of last year's SFr2.9 billion loss was caused by provisions against its investments in Sabena and the others.Mr Corti has thrown this disastrous strategy into reverse, extricating Swissair from France, and thus putting an end to the annual outflow of nearly SFr1 billion to prop up the ailing French trio.
Some British officials think the Afghan mission is hopeless: better to start extricating Western troops than to redouble the military effort.
It sold one, but was still extricating itself from Iberdrola, a power firm, at a steep loss.Now the outlook is slightly better, apart from press reports of a bribery probe, which had been initiated by Leighton in 2011.
We do not seem to have grasped that relations between France and Germany, the central equation of Europe, were now on a new footing: if not united they were not brought together by the psychological bond of defeat in war for the first time for nearly a century and a half; the two countries were quits at last and both had a similar purpose in extricating themselves from national humiliation.
"They know I can't do it alone".Mr Adesina is trying to help farmers by, among other things, extricating government from the business of procuring and distributing fertiliser.
The next-largest such conglomerate, Viag, may have little choice but to follow suit.RWE and Veba have been extricating themselves from their costly, unsuccessful diversification into telecoms.
These last, says the minister responsible, should target "evil groups that aim to destabilise the country".To complete its return to a cosy cocoon of 1960s-era nostalgia, when many thousands of Muslim Brothers languished in prison and Cairo trumpeted a prickly pan-Arabism, Egypt is clumsily extricating itself from four decades of close partnership with the United States.
Should you happen to meet the writer of a book you could be expected to have read, you might find useful the advice proffered here: "While maintaining the greatest possible degree of ambiguity...tell him that you like what he wrote".The third and final section contains the book's meat: the "various means of extricating ourselves from these situations with grace".
Perowne sidesteps a beating, extricating himself from Baxter's clutches by correctly guessing that he is suffering from a neuro-degenerative disease.
He is making a good fist of extricating America from the big wars he inherited from George Bush.
