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Washington, D.C.— Today, Congressman Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.), a senior member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, released the following statement in response to reports that AIG will be paying another round of bonuses to top executives:
“AIG should be doing everything it can to pay back the American people who bailed the company out—not to pay off its executives. These executives’ bonuses are that they still even have jobs, which they owe to the taxpayers whose hard-earned dollars were put toward keeping the company from collapsing.
“We should all be concerned that a company that can’t pay back the $180 billion it borrowed from American taxpayers can still somehow scrape up the money to pay millions of dollars in bonuses to its executives. By going through with these bonuses, AIG will be sending a loud message that it is still completely out of touch with the rest of the country. Everyone else is making concessions in these hard economic times, from the automakers to the people on my street forced to scale back on everything from groceries to recreation. The corporate executives on Wall Street should not be exempt.
“By reaching out to Kenneth Feinberg, the ‘Compensation Czar,’ before making these payments, the leadership at AIG is showing that on at least some level they know this is wrong. Although Mr. Feinberg does not have authority over these bonuses because they were promised in 2008, I am hopeful that he will strongly reiterate to AIG President Obama’s views about corporate excess and bonuses. If AIG doesn’t have the money to survive on its own, it doesn’t have the money to dole out large bonuses to its executives.”
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