Eli Lil­ly adds new board mem­ber Kim­ber­ly John­son, the COO who helped lead Fan­nie Mae out of the US hous­ing cri­sis

It’s been an ug­ly cou­ple of weeks for Eli Lil­ly’s C-suite af­ter for­mer CFO Josh Smi­ley was shown the door for send­ing “in­ap­pro­pri­ate mes­sages.” In the fall­out from that scan­dal, Lil­ly could be ex­cused for look­ing to mit­i­gate some of its risk — and Fan­nie Mae COO Kim­ber­ly John­son join­ing the board could help on that front.

John­son joined Fan­nie in 2006, months be­fore the wheels came off the US hous­ing mar­ket. The mort­gage fi­nancier was roughed up in the fall­out from that cri­sis and im­pli­cat­ed as one of the in­sti­tu­tion­al play­ers that loaded up on bad-mon­ey sub­prime loans with the gov­ern­ment’s back­ing. In fact, the firm’s de­riv­a­tives port­fo­lio hedg­ing those balky mort­gages may have added even more fu­el to the fire.

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