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NEW YORK: Eleven executives at AIG quit the troubled insurance giant despite being paid bonuses of at least a million dollars each to stay, New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo said on Tuesday.
"Eleven of the individuals who received 'retention' bonuses of one million dollars or more are no longer working at AIG, including one who received 4.6 million dollars," Cuomo said wrote in a letter to Barney Frank, chairman of the financial services committee in the US House of Representatives.
The news undermined the argument of government-appointed AIG boss Edward Liddy that the bonuses were necessary to retain "the best and brightest talent."
"Given the trillion-dollar portfolio at AIG Financial Products, retaining key traders and risk managers is critical to our goal of repayment," he wrote in a letter Saturday to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.
Cuomo said that AIG had paid out more than 160 million dollars in bonuses to employees at AIG's Financial Products Subsidiary, the branch at the heart of the company's near collapse.
A total of 73 employees received a million dollars or more, while the top seven received more than four million dollars each, Cuomo said.
"Thus, last week, AIG made more than 73 millionaires in the unit which lost so much money that it brought the firm to its knees, forcing a taxpayer bailout. Something is deeply wrong with this outcome. I hope the Committee will address it head on," Cuomo wrote to Frank. - AFP/de
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