Bonuses, bank payments and credit default swaps checked
New Jersey’s attorney general Ann Milgram has received the bonus details it demanded from AIG and has said: "We are investigating whether there are any misstatements and unconscionable business practices."
New Jersey is leading a 19-state coalition investigating AIG's bonuses. Milgram is cooperating with New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo. Cuomo's separate probe has spurred some of the insurer's executives to return their bonuses.
Cuomo has also expanded his inquiry by issuing subpoenas demanding details of AIG's of credit default swaps.
Other AIG news
- "Today's FP employees did not create the credit default swaps that were at the heart of the company's liquidity crisis. And yet many of them had years of their compensation and sweat equity literally wiped out by the losses at FP," Stephen Blake, head of human resources at the financial products unit, told lawmakers. He was testifying on Thursday before a Connecticut legislative committee after state authorities subpoenaed 14 current and former AIG executives in a deepening probe over compensation and bonus practices. Lawmakers agreed to allow Blake to be the sole AIG representative after several of the executives received threats. Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal is seeking private meetings with others who have been subpoenaed.
- Lawmakers called for a federal probe into whether banks including Goldman Sachs and European banks received more funds than necessary from the bailout of AIG. “We would like to know if the AIG counterparty payments, as made, were in the best interests of the taxpayers,” said 27 members of Congress led by Elijah Cummings, a Democrat from Maryland, in a letter dated to Neil Barofsky, inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program. Banks got about $50 billion in payments tied to credit-default swaps.
