In the late 1990s no analyst had as much influence over the telecom sector as Jack Grubman, writes Conor O'Clery.

He was the ultimate power-broker in the booming industry and, at $20 million (€20.4 million) a year, the highest-paid analyst ever. Everyone wanted a bit of him.

"He's almost a demigod," gushed Robert Knowling, chief executive of Covad Communications a couple of years ago. "He's the king of telecom. He has pixie dust."

Mr Grubman maybe believed that himself. "I'm sculpting the industry," he boasted in 2000. "I get feedback from the institutions and the chief executives. It feeds on itself. It's a virtuous circle."

The Salomon Smith Barney analyst contemptuously dismissed any suggestion he breached the Chinese wall between objective analysis and touting for investment business.

"Objective?" he snorted, "The other word for it is uninformed. . . What used to be a conflict is now a synergy."

Mr Grubman was a mover and shaker with the chief executives of the companies he was covering, doing deals, match-making, scolding and prompting. An associate described him as a Wall Street consigliere.

If Salomon Smith Barney did not take a telecom company public, it was assumed that it had to go elsewhere because Mr Grubman had turned it down as not good enough.

Next Monday the House Financial Services Committee in the US Congress will be looking for its bit of the consigliere, as they investigate the collapse of WorldCom, the biggest company failure in US corporate history.

No analyst got closer to a company than Mr Grubman did to WorldCom. He was a guest at the 1999 wedding of WorldCom's bearded, lay-preacher founder, Bernard Ebbers - who will also be in the dock on Capitol Hill on Monday.

Mr Grubman, the son of a boxer from Philadelphia, came into the business after graduating from Boston University - not the more prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as he claims in his CV - when he joined AT&T.

He moved to Wall Street in 1985 and distinguished himself with a brave call on his old employer when he downgraded AT&T from a buy to a neutral: AT&T underperformed while the start-ups Mr Grubman favoured soared.

In July 1998 Grubman bragged: "There is no telecom stock in the world that will be anywhere near the performer WorldCom will be over the next several years."

People who followed his calls made money, then. But in March 2001, when telecom was already in crisis, Mr Grubman began to look silly. He wrote a report, saying: "Over the next 18 months investors will look back at current prices of the leading players and wish that they had bought stock at those prices."

The players he promoted so enthusiastically were WorldCom, Global Crossing and Qwest, all now practically defunct. It was no big secret a year ago how bad things were; people talked about the biggest danger to the world economy being the coming crash of the telecoms.

Yet Mr Grubman kept a "buy" rating on WorldCom right up until April this year, although shares had by then lost 92 per cent of their value as the company debt soared.

So for whom was Mr Grubman making his recommendations in recent time?

His forecasts certainly did not benefit investors.

If you acted on each one of Mr Grubman's buy recommendations since February 1999 and sold when he downgraded the stock, you would have suffered a 74.5 per cent loss, according to MarketPerform.com.

In light of the series of post-telecom boom scandals, the Wall Street Journal compared the corporate landscape in the United States today to the French Quarter in New Orleans the morning after a Mardi Gras.

There are lots of discarded masks, and reports that pick-pockets and con artists had been at work, some dressed in three-piece suits.

If Congress members at next week's hearings decide the pickpockets are those executives who sold off stock at huge profits while investors got burned, then there is no prize for guessing who they will conclude the con artists are.

Mr Grubman is in for an uncomfortable interrogation.