She was known as the "queen of clean" by those who saw her in a crusading role to restore integrity to the giant Wall Street investment banks.

To others she was known as "Sallie Paycheck" for being one of the best-paid women in the history of the Street of Dreams.

Today Sallie Krawcheck, one of the most powerful women in the worldwide financial system, was out of a job, victim of a huge power struggle at Citigroup, America's largest bank and struggling, like its rivals, to come to terms with the credit crisis.

Krawcheck, 43, long tipped as a potential boss of Citi, has left the bank after a series of high-profile rows with chief executive Vikram Pandit over its future direction.

Her departure has been a long time coming, say Citigroup watchers who had seen Pandit demote her from her high-flying role as chief financial officer and then offer her an advisory role to the bank's key wealth management arm, a division that until last week she had led.

The departure of Krawcheck sees the fall of one of the last remaining senior women on Wall Street.
In the past year, "the Cruz Missile", Morgan Stanley's bond-dealing head Zoe Cruz went, a victim of that bank's multi-billion losses in the American mortgage crisis.

This summer another amazon of the industry, Erin Callan, chief financial officer of Lehman Brothers, was dismissed by her now-discredited boss Dick Fuld.

Krawcheck was paid millions of dollars a year and cleaned up the reputation of the bank, whose integrity was holed by the conflict of interest crisis into broker support for questionable dot-com ventures.