AIG bonus recipient skewers CEO and other critics
This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.
An executive at American International Group goes on the record today with a blistering attack on CEO Edward Liddy, Congress and the New York and Connecticut attorneys general.
Jake DeSantis, who had headed the insurance giant’s equity and commodities trading but for the past year has been on the team dismantling the financial-products unit -- the division at the heart of the company’s collapse -- wrote a resignation letter to Liddy that was published as an op-ed piece in the New York Times.
The gist of it: DeSantis says the employees deserved the $165 million in retention bonuses they were promised, and feels betrayed by Liddy for failing to defend the payments against the firestorm of national outrage they triggered.
Most of the division’s current employees had nothing to do with the financial-products unit’s massive losses but were brought in to clean up the mess, DeSantis writes. ‘Most of those responsible have left the company and have conspicuously escaped the public outrage,’ he says.
From the letter:
After 12 months of hard work dismantling the company -- during which AIG reassured us many times we would be rewarded in March 2009 -- we in the financial products unit have been betrayed by AIG and are being unfairly persecuted by elected officials. Like you, I was asked to work for an annual salary of $1, and I agreed out of a sense of duty to the company and to the public officials who have come to its aid. Having now been let down by both, I can no longer justify spending 10, 12, 14 hours a day away from my family for the benefit of those who have let me down. You’ve now asked the current employees of AIG-FP to repay these earnings. . . . As most of us have done nothing wrong, guilt is not a motivation to surrender our earnings. We have worked 12 long months under these contracts and now deserve to be paid as promised. None of us should be cheated of our payments any more than a plumber should be cheated after he has fixed the pipes but a careless electrician causes a fire that burns down the house.
DeSantis says the ‘only real motivation’ that employees have to give back the money ‘is fear,’ given that the attorneys general of New York and Connecticut had held out the possibility of publicly ‘naming and shaming’ the bonus recipients.
For his part, DeSantis writes, he will donate his post-tax bonus ‘to those suffering from the global economic downturn. My intent is to keep none of the money myself.’
-- Tom Petruno