Posted on 05/31/2009 5:36:43 AM PDT by Liz
EXCLUSIVE AIG is trying to seize a $490M charitable endowment -- and claw back $27M it gave charities -- to pay executive bonuses......... back in the 70s, AIG co-founders set up their own offshore piggy bank -- and seeded it with stock shares that would build up nest eggs and bonuses for retiring AIG execs. Legal experts say that if AIG wins, it would have the right to sue to claw back some of the $27M already awarded to charities. The US govt owns nearly 80% of AIG via the Treasury's $70B cash infusion and loans for up to $85B. Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Calif.)said that if AIG wins the money, "it should go to taxpayers, not for bonuses."
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
AIG should’a preceded GM into bankruptcy.
Government should not own a business. The temptation to confiscate money is too great. Government officials do not understand business, when they need more money they print it. They have benefits that no private sector person has. They retire on defined pensions and have health care benefits we in the private sector will never enjoy but get the priviledge to pay for. Social security is a ponzi scheme they use to finance their largesse by selling favors to the highest bidder (lobbyists). Tax code is their currency. Demonizing hard work and success is their ticket to power using class warfare as a tool to manipulate the masses.
Sounds like a Freeper.
That is not the correct amount. Put all the top executives of AIG in jail throw away the key, sell all their personal assets and confiscate and then we should get really serious about the rope and pitch forks. These people are nothing but the lowest of trash.
Regarding this list, it looks like they’ll be allowed to get their money back as long as they continue along the same contribution path.
I work for a small company that has as one of it’s
customers a property management corp. which leases office
space to AIG. AIG recently finished a top notch rennovation
of this space no doubt financed by bailout money. That’s
belt-tightening for you (AIG style, anyway).
These welfare queens are beyond disgraceful. Like any other such people, our country is better off without them.
This is a tranfer of wealth undreampt of by any welfare queen.
May 19, 2005
Court Papers Detail Bonuses at AIG (registered in offshore money-launder haven)
By LYNNLEY BROWNING, NY TIMES, May 19, 2005
Fresh details have emerged in court papers about the inner workings of a private offshore company that had been paying big bonuses to top executives of the insurance giant American International Group (AIG). The company, Starr International, awarded tens of millions of dollars in payouts over a two-year period at a time when it was ineligible to do so under its own operating laws, according to the court papers, which cite internal AIG documents.
The new details are contained in an amended lawsuit that was filed late Tuesday in Delaware Chancery Court by a Louisiana pension fund that is suing AIG and its directors over what it calls questionable dealings. Those dealings are said to include undisclosed related-party transactions conducted by AIG with Starr International and with another AIG-affiliated private company, C. V. Starr & Company.
Starr International, which is registered in Panama, is AIG's largest shareholder, with nearly 12 percent of AIG stock, now worth around $16 billion. The company is run by AIG's recently ousted chairman and chief executive, Maurice R. Greenberg, and by a handful of other senior former AIG executives, all hand-picked by him. Mr. Greenberg is president and chief executive of Starr International, and owns about 8.3 percent of the private company.
Federal and New York investigators have been looking at the Starr affiliates as part of their investigations into questionable transactions by AIG Starr International, according to AIG's 2000 annual report, is not supposed to set aside AIG shares for executives during any two-year period in its compensation plan when AIG does not report growth in its earnings per share. Nevertheless, when AIG had no such growth around 2000 and 2001 because of claims stemming from the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Starr International set aside Shares totaling $41.7 million, the court papers say. A spokesman for AIG declined to comment.
Even though Starr International had been a long-term incentive compensation pool for AIG's top 700 executives and managers, all of its payouts were decided upon within the private company, without the participation or approval of AIG's own executive compensation committee, according to the court papers.
The pension fund, the Teachers' Retirement System of Louisiana, filed its original complaint in December 2002, but amended its lawsuit to include charges of breach of fiduciary duty stemming from questions raised since then by investigators, as well as from various settlements and announcements by AIG
In March, AIG made an extraordinary disclosure that "internal mismanagement" and "improper accounting" had bolstered its results, and said earlier this month that correcting those errors would shave $2.7 billion of net worth from the company. AIG also said that it would begin expensing Starr International's compensation as required by standard accounting practices, something it had not done previously.
The amended complaint now includes the second private company, C. V. Starr, as a defendant. Stuart Grant, an attorney at Grant & Eisenhofer, the Delaware law firm representing the pension fund, declined yesterday to say why Starr International was not also a defendant. In an unusual move, the amended complaint asks the Delaware judge overseeing the case to place the assets of C. V. Starr in a court-appointed trust, for the benefit of AIG shareholders. C. V. Starr is a lucrative private holding company owned and run by top AIG executives and incorporated in Delaware. It is known internally within AIG as "the billionaires club," according to the complaint.
C. V. Starr sells specialized insurance policies with AIG's name on them and, according to previous court papers, had a net profit of $102 million from 1999 through 2002. C. V. Starr pays its approximately 80 partners, all AIG executives, undisclosed dividends and benefits from its undisclosed profits.
The pension fund argues that all of the money paid by AIG to C. V. Starr, in the form of various commissions, should go to AIG shareholders, since AIG can do the work that C. V. Starr does. The amended complaint discloses that AIG paid direct commissions to C. V. Starr of $495.2 million from 1999 to 2003. The figure is $24.5 million more than AIG disclosed to shareholders in its own SEC filings, according to the complaint. Direct commissions are payments for the production of business.
SOURCE http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/19/business/19insure.html
Not that there is anything I agree with in the AIG debacle, it should be noted that a commercial renovation is not an overnight process.
Concept, plans, specs, bids, permits, approvals, nothing is stock-always six weeks or more...we didn’t know the plumbing main was there!...That’s not quite the chartreuse in the specs and the owner will not accept...
Probably was well along the way when it hit the fan.
That should guarantee some a free jail card!!!
If you or I tried that, we'd go to jail, go directly to jail, do not pass GO, do not collect $200.
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