AIG Lawyer Offers to Return $6.4M Bonus, Stations Guards at His Home
An AIG lawyer who was general counsel of the insurance company’s troubled financial products unit has offered to return his $6.4 million bonus, the largest amount handed out to company executives.
The lawyer, Douglas Poling, is returning the bonus “because he thought it was the correct thing to do,” according to AIG spokesman Mark Herr, who spoke to the New York Times. Poling had overseen legal work on contracts for products such as customized insurance-like swaps and other derivative contracts, the Wall Street Journal reports (sub. req.). Paper losses on the contracts were once estimated at more than $10 billion, the Wall Street Journal says.
More recently, Poling has sold off about 80 percent of the unit’s assets, and the money will go to the government, according to Gerry Pasciucco, a former Morgan Stanley vice chairman who was hired to wind down the unit. Poling, a former Wall Street lawyer, is currently executive vice president overseeing energy and infrastructure investments at AIG, the Wall Street Journal says.
Poling has “done an outstanding job in winding down his investment books,” Pasciucco told the Times. “He did it at the right time, and we’ve made money. We would be losing money today if we waited to sell some of these assets.”
The New York Post identified Poling and two other AIG managers getting bonuses in a story posted on Wednesday. The Times says Poling’s home in Fairfield, Ct., is being watched by private security guards. He is the son of Harold “Red” Poling, a former chief executive officer of Ford Motor Co. who instituted cost controls that made the auto maker one of the most profitable throughout the 1990s, the Wall Street Journal says.
The Wall Street Journal reports on a meeting attended by Poling in which the head of the financial products unit, Joseph Cassano, berated an in-house auditor for raising questions about a joint venture led by Poling. The auditor later resigned after his communications to the parent company were restricted, the story says.
