Trouble-causing financial products division sees resignations
Senior figures within AIG’s controversial financial products unit have resigned, news sources report.
The division is at the heart of the financial problems that brought AIG to the brink of bankruptcy last September and led to the $180bn bailout.
Reuters said AIG declined to specify the exact number of resignations, noting they were expected to be "manageable," and said there were indications that more will follow.
Reuters reported that New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo said that 15 of the top 20 AIG bonus recipients had returned the awards in full, calculating the value of the awards at about $50m. He added that he expected as much as half, or about $80m to be recovered. The Times said nine of the top 10 had repaid their bonuses.
The FT reported that resistance to a planned 90% tax on the bonuses was growing after President Obama suggested the proposals could violate the constitution and urged Congress not to "govern out of anger".
David Pauly, a columnist for Bloomberg, calculated the total bonuses worked out to 0.0009016% of the US bailout to AIG. He described them as: “Immaterial. Trifling.”
