Courtesy of Pam Martens.
Maurice (Hank) Greenberg
Last week, Ryan Chittum, writing for the Columbia Journalism Review, unleashed the simmering disgust of hundreds of editors and reporters across America: why won’t former Chairman and CEO of AIG, Maurice (Hank) Greenberg, just shut up and go to trial on his eight year old charges of engaging in accounting fraud at his former company. He’s now on his third New York State Attorney General who has valiantly tried to let this case see the sunshine of a jury trial.
What Greenberg has done instead is to pay the law firm of superlawyer David Boies to motion our courts to death while his army of pr flacks try his case on CNBC and in the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal. Greenberg’s latest soiree into fantasy land came in an October 2 piece in the Wall Street Journal where Greenberg empathized out loud with JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon, who is currently under multi-continent investigations for alleged wrongdoing.
Well, Chittum has had it. I mean, had it. In a headline at CJR last Friday, Chittum called Greenberg “narcissistic and deluded,” adding later in the article that Greenberg “has a case of oligarch empathy for Dimon—the kind that allows him to once again, despite all the evidence, claim to have been wrongly martyred…”
Taking on Greenberg’s revisionist history of the fall of AIG, Chittum warns readers to “Bust out your hip waders. It’s deep here,” then moves on to differentiate fact from Greenberg fiction:
“…Greenberg’s charge that ‘Nearly all of Mr. Spitzer’s original allegations of accounting irregularities have been discarded or quietly dismissed by him and his successors’ is misleading, to say the least. Greenberg was forced out of AIG in 2005 by his board of directors, which then paid $1.6 billion—the largest regulatory settlement in history at the time—to New York and the Bush SEC for securities fraud involving ‘improper accounting, bid rigging and practices involving workers’ compensation funds’ and restated years of inflated profits, reducing them by $4 billion. Several executives from General Reinsurance and AIG were convicted criminally for fraud, though those were later overturned on appeal. The execs then paid fines and ‘acknowledged that parts of the transaction were fraudulent, that they disregarded red flags suggesting the deal would be ‘improperly accounted for,’ and that they ‘should have attempted to stop it from going forward, but instead continued to participate in it…’
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