Ball point pen on the morning newsprint Founder of AIG, Hank Greenberg, was forced to leave the company in 2005 under threat of indictment by New York's (then) attorney general Eliot Spitzer, but not without a very nice golden parachute. As PART of his deferred compensation, he received 3.7 million shares of AIG stock in January of 08. At that time AIG's stock price was in the mid 50's making the payment worth about $200 million, for which he paid $70 million in taxes. Today AIG's stock is valued at 42 cents, making those same shares worth 1.5 million. Now Greenberg is suing his former company claiming they hid their exposure to sub-prime, artificially keeping the stock price high. I guess he's in a position to know. Yesterday on Bloomberg, current CEO Liddy claimed that Greenberg was at the helm during the formation of AIG’s financial products unit, which sold derivatives that cost th ...
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Ball point pen on the morning newsprint AIG's stock price two years ago was 69.00 per share, one year ago it was 42.00. Liddy took over the helm in June of last year with the stock in the 30's. Later that year, while Lehman Brothers and other giants were going bankrupt, AIG was deemed too big to fail and received $85 billion in bailout money. A month later Liddy defended spending $440,000 of that money on a retreat at a luxurious California resort saying it was "standard practice in our industry" Today the stock is at 0.42 a share and AIG is receiving another 30 Billion in taxpayers dollars. What started as as a mortgage crisis is now a crisis in confidence. Since shinning a light on the "standard practices" of corporate America, investors have no confidence that this current crop of CEO's know the value of our hard earned dollars. Yesterday the Dow dropped below 7,000 for the first ...
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