article AIG "retention bonus"-sally.p

The NYT reports:


Seventy-three employees were paid more than $1 million in the newly minted bonuses at the insurance giant, American International Group, according to the New York attorney general Andrew M. Cuomo.

The attorney general provided some new details on Tuesday about some of the $160 million in bonuses that the insurance giant paid out last week in a letter sent to Representative Barney Frank, the chairman of the House Committee on Financial Services.

Mr. Cuomo did not name the recipients of bonuses, but said one employee received more than $6.4 million. The top seven received more than $4 million each, and the top 10 received a combined $42 million. Eleven of those who received “retention” bonuses of $1 million or more are no longer working at A.I.G., including one who received $4.6 million, he said. (emphasis added)

This story gets more and more interesting. Bloomberg is reporting that:

“American International Group Inc., the insurer under fire for handing out bonuses after its $173 billion government bailout, budgeted $57 million in “retention” pay for employees who will be dismissed.”

AIG disclosed the payments, part of a larger $1 billion program meant to retain staff, in a March 2 filing. The insurer was chastised yesterday by President Barack Obama for awarding $165 million to staff of the derivatives unit blamed for the firm’s near collapse, and New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo said he’ll subpoena AIG to get details on those payments. (emphasis added)

The latest idea: 100% taxes on bonuses from bailout firms:

Well it looks like the whole American International Group Inc. (NYSE:AIG) bonus hoopla might not blow over after all. With public anger growing, Congress is jumping all over the issue and vowing not to let the troubled insurer’s executives walk away with the money, even if it means writing laws specifically to get money back.

While Democrats haven’t yet matched Iowa’s Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley’s suggestion that AIG’s brass commit suicide, they are throwing out some radical threats on the $165 million in bonus money. According to The Associated Press, “House and Senate Democrats were crafting separate bills to tax up to 100% of generous bonuses awarded by companies rescued by taxpayer money.”



A.I.G. Planning Huge Bonuses After $170 Billion Bailout



Published: March 14, 2009

WASHINGTON — The American International Group, which has received more than $170 billion in taxpayer bailout money from the Treasury and Federal Reserve, plans to pay about $165 million in bonuses by Sunday to executives in the same business unit that brought the company to the brink of collapse last year.

Word of the bonuses last week stirred such deep consternation inside the Obama administration that Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner told the firm they were unacceptable and demanded they be renegotiated, a senior administration official said. But the bonuses will go forward because lawyers said the firm was contractually obligated to pay them.

The payments to A.I.G.’s financial products unit are in addition to $121 million in previously scheduled bonuses for the company’s senior executives and 6,400 employees across the sprawling corporation. Mr. Geithner last week pressured A.I.G. to cut the $9.6 million going to the top 50 executives in half and tie the rest to performance.

The payment of so much money at a company at the heart of the financial collapse that sent the broader economy into a tailspin almost certainly will fuel a popular backlash against the government’s efforts to prop up Wall Street. Past bonuses already have prompted President Obama and Congress to impose tough rules on corporate executive compensation at firms bailed out with taxpayer money.

A.I.G., nearly 80 percent of which is now owned by the government, defended its bonuses, arguing that they were promised last year before the crisis and cannot be legally canceled. In a letter to Mr. Geithner, Edward M. Liddy, the government-appointed chairman of A.I.G., said at least some bonuses were needed to keep the most skilled executives.

“We cannot attract and retain the best and the brightest talent to lead and staff the A.I.G. businesses — which are now being operated principally on behalf of American taxpayers — if employees believe their compensation is subject to continued and arbitrary adjustment by the U.S. Treasury,” he wrote Mr. Geithner on Saturday.

Still, Mr. Liddy seemed stung by his talk with Mr. Geithner, calling their conversation last Wednesday “a difficult one for me” and noting that he receives no bonus himself. “Needless to say, in the current circumstances,” Mr. Liddy wrote, “I do not like these arrangements and find it distasteful and difficult to recommend to you that we must proceed with them.”

An A.I.G. spokeswoman said Saturday that the company had no comment beyond the letter. The bonuses were first reported by Bloomberg News.

The senior government official, who was not authorized to speak on the record, said the administration was outraged. “It is unacceptable for Wall Street firms receiving government assistance to hand out million-dollar bonuses, while hard-working Americans bear the burden of this economic crisis,” the official said.

Of all the financial institutions that have been propped up by taxpayer dollars, none has received more money than A.I.G. and none has infuriated lawmakers more with practices that policy makers have called reckless.

The bonuses will be paid to executives at A.I.G.’s financial products division, the unit that wrote trillions of dollars’ worth of credit-default swaps that protected investors from defaults on bonds backed in many cases by subprime mortgages.

The bonus plan covers 400 employees, and the bonuses range from as little as $1,000 to as much as $6.5 million. Seven executives at the financial products unit were entitled to receive more than $3 million in bonuses.

Mr. Liddy, whom Federal Reserve and Treasury officials recruited after A.I.G. faltered last September and received its first round of bailout money, said the bonuses and “retention pay” had been agreed to in early 2008 and were for the most part legally required.

The company told the Treasury that there were two categories of bonus payments, with the first to be given to senior executives. The administration official said Mr. Geithner had told A.I.G. to revise them to protect taxpayer dollars and tie future payments to performance.

The second group of bonuses covers some 2008 retention payments from contracts entered into before government involvement in A.I.G. Indeed, in his letter to Mr. Geithner, Mr. Liddy wrote that he had shown the details of the $450 million bonus pool to outside lawyers and been told that A.I.G. had no choice but to follow through with the payment schedule.

The administration official said the Treasury Department did its own legal analysis and concluded that those contracts could not be broken. The official noted that even a provision recently pushed through Congress by Senator Christopher J. Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat, had an exemption for such bonus agreements already in place.

But the official said the administration will force A.I.G. to eventually repay the cost of the bonuses to the taxpayers as part of the agreement with the firm, which is being restructured.

A.I.G. did cut other bonuses, Mr. Liddy explained, but those were part of the compensation for people who dealt in other parts of the company and had no direct involvement with the derivatives.

Mr. Liddy wrote that A.I.G. hoped to reduce its retention bonuses for 2009 by 30 percent. He said the top 25 executives at the financial products division had also agreed to reduce their salary for the rest of 2009 to $1.

Ever since it was bailed out by the government last fall, A.I.G. has been defending itself against accusations that it was richly compensating people who caused one of the biggest financial crises in American history.

A.I.G.’s main business is insurance, but the financial products unit sold hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of derivatives, the notorious credit-default swaps that nearly toppled the entire company last fall.

A.I.G. had set up a special bonus pool for the financial products unit early in 2008, before the company’s near collapse, when problems stemming from the mortgage crisis were becoming clear and there were concerns that some of the best-informed derivatives specialists might leave. It locked in a total amount, $450 million, for the financial products unit and prepared to pay it in a series of installments, to encourage people to stay.

Only part of the payments had been made by last fall, when A.I.G. nearly collapsed. In documents provided to the Treasury, A.I.G. said it was required to pay about $165 million in bonuses on or before Sunday. That is in addition to $55 million in December.

Under a deal reached last week, A.I.G. agreed that the top 50 executives would get half of the $9.6 million they were supposed to get by March 15. The second half of their bonuses would be paid out in two installments in July and in September. To get those payments, Treasury officials said, A.I.G. would have to show that it had made progress toward its goal of selling off business units and repaying the government.

AIG: “Retention” Payments for Leaving?!?!?!




I wanted to make one more point about the revelation from Andrew Cuomo’s letter to Barney Frank that some of those getting "retention" bonuses are gone from AIG.

Eleven of the individuals who received "retention" bonuses of $1 million or more are no longer working at AIG, including one who received $4.6 million;

"Retention" bonuses for those who left? That’s even nuttier than paying the guys who broke the global finance system millions for staying!

Here’s what AIG said about the purpose of those bonuses.

In the first quarter of 2008, AIGFP adopted a retention plan for about 400 employees that provided guaranteed payments to employees if they worked through specified payment dates (or either resigned for good reason or was terminated without cause before the relevant dates). At the time, AIGFP was expected to have a valuable, on-going role at AIG. The plan was implemented because there was a significant risk of departures among employees at AIGFP, and given the $2.7 trillion of derivative positions at AIGFP at that time, retention incentives appeared to be in the best interest of all of AIG’s stakeholders.

Now, we still don’t know shit about these contracts–even Cuomo, who has at least seen the contracts, doesn’t know who got them. But assuming this white paper is not lying (which I wouldn’t guarantee), then the people who have left AIG but got the "retention" bonuses fall into one of three categories:

1. Still employed by AIGFP as of a specified payment date, but left after that date

2. Terminated without cause

3. Resigned "for good reason"–whatever that means

In other words, either they’ve got the retention bonuses tied to dates that mature long before the bonuses themselves do (which seems unlikely, but so do these bonuses more generally), some of these 11 people were terminated without cause even knowing they’d get humongous bonuses anyway, or they resigned "for good reason." Since the first two seem so stupid, I’m going to guess that these 11 people fall into the last category (but that’s just a wildarsed guess).

So what does "for good reason" mean?

AIG Said to Offer Retention Payment to Bigger Group of Workers

Dec. 13 (Bloomberg) -- American International Group Inc., the insurer under fire for paying 168 executives not to quit after a government takeover, is giving retention awards to at least 2,000 more employees, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The “retention bonus” equals as much as a year’s salary and recipients were ordered to keep the payment secret, said the person, who declined to be named because the plan was labeled confidential. Awards were offered to as much as 10 percent of staff at businesses that are for sale, including plane-leasing and insurance units in the U.S. and overseas, the person said.

AIG said in September that 130 executives will get awards, just days after the New York-based firm got a government rescue package that now totals $152.5 billion. AIG Chief Executive Officer Edward Liddy told Congress last week the payments will go to 168 people, with some getting as much as $4 million.

“If it has the money to give these disguised bonuses to thousands of its employees, then I think it is time for Mr. Liddy to write a check to the federal government repaying the money it took,” said Representative Elijah Cummings, a Maryland Democrat, in a statement yesterday.

Nicholas Ashooh, an AIG spokesman, said life insurance unit chiefs were allowed to give retention awards to as much as 10 percent of their staffs, and selected “closer to 7 or 8 percent” of workers. There are about 37,000 employees in AIG life units around the world, Ashooh said. A typical payment is equal to about six months of salary, he said.

Maintaining Value

“It’s not a senior executive program, it’s for the employees running the businesses day to day, around the world,” Ashooh said yesterday. “We want to maintain the value of the businesses so we get the most value and repay the government.”

Ashooh said there “may be” retention programs for other AIG subsidiaries that are for sale. The insurer’s plane-leasing unit isn’t part of the life insurance program, Ashooh said.

Units that AIG is trying to sell employ about 70,000 people, which means that as many as 7,000 could receive payments, the person said.

Cummings said he felt deceived by the company. “Liddy told me in writing that his company was awarding 168 retention payments,” he said. “There is no way around that figure. I cannot imagine Mr. Liddy accidentally overlooking a few thousand employees targeted to receive these funds.”

Liddy is trying to sell AIG businesses to repay loans included in the government rescue which entitles the U.S. to a 79.9 percent stake. He said in a letter last week to Cummings that payments to executives are to help maintain the value of units for sale.

Demanding Secrecy

The insurer requires recipients to keep the payments confidential, according to a contract obtained by Bloomberg News. Exceptions included financial and legal advisers, as well as immediate family. If awardees tell other outsiders about the existence of the program, they will forfeit future payments, the contract says.

“All of our efforts with respect to our retention program have been made in the light of day,” Liddy said in the Dec. 5 letter to Cummings, who serves on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

Cummings has criticized the retention pay, saying AIG misled taxpayers who now own most of the company and that it’s unnecessary to give so much cash to retain people when job markets are weak. U.S. finance companies have announced 220,506 job cuts this year through November, placement firm Challenger Grey & Christmas Inc. said in a Dec. 3 report.

‘Failing Institution’

Assistant Treasury Secretary Neel Kashkari, who supervises the U.S. financial rescue program, has called some of AIG’s bonuses “excessive for a failing institution.”

In one instance, an AIG manager of an overseas unit told his superior that the payments weren’t needed because employees were unlikely to leave, the person said. The manager was overruled, said the person.

Most of the managers will get the first installment this month or in January and must stay through 2009 or early 2010 to get the full amount, the person said.

The 168 managers in the first round get awards of 100 percent to 300 percent of their annual salaries, the person said. Those payments were approved by an AIG compensation committee two days after the company’s Sept. 16 bailout, the insurer has said. That rescue included an $85 billion loan that saved AIG from bankruptcy, shortly after the government allowed investment bank Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. to fail.

The insurer’s rescue package was expanded last month after continuing losses from credit-default swaps, the contracts protecting against losses on mortgage bonds, and other bets made on U.S. housing. The company has posted four straight quarterly losses totaling about $43 billion.

AIG, under pressure from lawmakers to limit executive compensation, said on Nov. 25 that Liddy, 62, will receive $1 in salary through 2009. The company said it will freeze salaries and forgo 2008 bonuses for seven top leaders.