And it keeps getting better and better and better
From the
Dallas Morning News:
Bailed-out AIG to pay $100 million in executive bonuses
Despite being bailed out with more than $170 billion from the Treasury and Federal Reserve, American International Group is preparing to pay about $100 million in bonuses to executives in the same business unit that brought the company to the brink of collapse last year.
An official in the Obama administration said Saturday that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner had called AIG's government-appointed chairman, Edward Liddy, on Wednesday and asked that the company renegotiate the bonuses.
Administration officials said they had managed to reduce some of the bonuses but had allowed most of them to go forward after the company's chief executive said AIG was contractually obligated to pay them.
In a letter to Geithner, Liddy wrote: "Needless to say, in the current circumstances, I do not like these arrangements and find it distasteful and difficult to recommend to you that we must proceed with them."
The bonuses will be paid to executives at American International Group's Financial Products division, which wrote trillions of dollars' worth of credit-default swaps that protected investors from defaults on bonds backed by subprime mortgages.
Rope. Tree. Some assembly required...
Posted by DaveH at March 14, 2009 8:28 PM