Washington, June 23 (IANS) In perhaps the largest bloodletting on Wall Street recently, Citigroup is set this week to dismiss about 10 percent of its 65,000 investment banking employees worldwide in an aggressive round of layoffs, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported Monday. The bank headed by India-born Vikram Pandit, which has suffered $15 billion losses over the past two quarters, is likely to start handing out pink slips to about 6,500 workers Monday.

“Citi indicated earlier this year that it would be resizing this business in response to market conditions and as part of our ongoing re-engineering efforts,” company spokesman Dan Noonan was quoted as saying by the WSJ. He did not confirm specifics though.

Citigroup, which has over 350,000 people on its rolls around the world, had dismissed at least 9,000 workers as of March 31. Yet, the coming job cuts are unusual in their scope and severity.

Besides entire trading desks in New York and elsewhere vanishing, this round of layoffs may also see dozens of senior managing directors getting fired, the report said quoting unnamed sources.

The current round of layoffs is part of Pandit’s goal to reduce Citigroup’s annual expenses by $15 billion.

The latest cuts are the first big move by John Havens, who in March took over the firm’s institutional-clients group that which includes the investment bank.

A long-time lieutenant of Pandit, Havens has given the verdict that some of the investment bank’s businesses have been rendered obsolete by the credit crunch, while others are operating inefficiently and generating inadequate returns.