shareholder derivative actions

  • 09 Jan 2013 at 5:48 PM

AIG Directors Could Barely Get Through A Morning Of Pretending They Might Sue The Government

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Remember yesterday when AIG was going to sue the government for bailing it out? Hahaha yeah that was never going to happen, and today it didn’t:

American International Group Inc.’s directors decided Wednesday not to participate in a lawsuit that accuses the U.S. government of taking advantage of the company in its rescue from the financial crisis. … “The AIG Board has determined to refuse Starr’s demand in its entirety, and will neither pursue these claims itself nor permit Starr to pursue them in AIG’s name,” the company said in a release. …

Mindful of the potential backlash, a number of AIG directors entered Wednesday’s meeting leaning toward rejecting Starr’s request to join its suit, two people familiar with their thinking said

YOU THINK?

If you read as much of the Internet as I do, you probably noticed that a lot of people yesterday freaked the fuck out over the pseudo-fact that AIG was considering joining the lawsuit, brought by its ex-CEO Hank Greenberg and his investment company Starr International, against the U.S. government for basically being too mean in bailing out AIG. Some of these people were regulators, Senators, and Congressmen, three of whom penned this cheery missive to AIG: Read more »

  • 08 Jan 2013 at 10:27 AM

AIG’s Directors Will Spend Tomorrow Pretending That They Might Sue The Government

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Is AIG going to sue the government for bailing it out? Hahaha no of course not, come on, that would be nuts. So what is this?

The board of A.I.G. will meet on Wednesday to consider joining a $25 billion shareholder lawsuit against the government, court records show. The lawsuit does not argue that government help was not needed. It contends that the onerous nature of the rescue — the taking of what became a 92 percent stake in the company, the deal’s high interest rates and the funneling of billions to the insurer’s Wall Street clients — deprived shareholders of tens of billions of dollars and violated the Fifth Amendment, which prohibits the taking of private property for “public use, without just compensation.”

I say unto you that this meeting is not for “consider[ing] joining” that lawsuit, which is one part of former AIG CEO Hank Greenberg’s so-far-not-particularly-successful campaign to get his $25 billion back from the government. (This part, in the Court of Federal Claims, is still going, unlike the part in a New York federal court that was dismissed.) Rather, it is for humoring Hank Greenberg, and the way you humor people who have lots of high-priced lawyers is by giving their high-priced lawyers a chance to talk to other high-priced lawyers for a long time, with PowerPoint. This paragraph in AIG’s court filing is less “we may join the suit” and more “see Hank we are listening to you really carefully and care deeply about what you have to say now, please, go on, this is a safe space”: Read more »