Anastasia Kelly made good on her threat to quit if her comp was curtailed as a result of AIG’s bailout. While the former GC wasn’t among the top 25 highest paid employees of the insurer, she was apparently within the penumbra of pay czar (although around here we still think of him as the founding partner of Kaye Scholer’s DC office) Kenneth Feinberg’s authority.
Kelly had previously been GC of Fannie Mae, Sears, and MCI (after starting out at Wilmer Hale), and AIG didn’t skip a beat in bringing in another experienced veteran. The new GC will likely be Lehman’s old GC, Thomas Russo.
More on him, her, and their comp after the jump.
Russo has been cooling his heels at Patton Boggs, which was a surprise move, as he snubbed Cadwalader, his former firm. Now he has an offer letter in hand, but they need Feinberg to approve. Presumably Russo was on board before they went to the trouble of checking with Feinberg.
Considering the diaspora of former Lehman lawyers, who will Russo bring along? One likely candidate is former Head of Lehman’s Fixed Income Loan business, Jim Seery, who is currently at Sidley.
Don’t feel too bad for Kelly, though, depending on which account you believe, she’s getting anywhere from $2.6 to $3.8 million, although not only is the number in controversy, the whole resignation was testy
The reported deal comes on the heels of a flurry of reports on Kelly’s actions in a December pay dispute involving her, four other senior execs and the U.S. government’s pay czar Kenneth Feinberg. AIG’s board of directors used an outside law firm, Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, in December to review Kelly’s actions after she told the four executives how to protect their pay and hired outside attorneys from Dickstein Shapiro for advice.
The five wrote in Dec. 1 letters to the insurer that they were ready to quit if their pay was substantially cut by Feinberg. AIG, once the world’s biggest insurer, was handed a $182.3 billion taxpayer-funded bailout, placing company executives’ paychecks under Feinberg’s thumb.
Feinberg was already reviewing pay packages for a group of 75 AIG executives at the time. The four other execs, who work at AIG’s insurance and financial-services units, later withdrew their notices, leaving only Kelly’s outstanding. She later told the company she would resign, the Journal reported.
The GC role at AIG is extremely political. Ernie Patrikis held the job for eight years, after being brought in to work as a special advisor to former CEO Hank Greenberg in 1998. After Greenberg was ousted, Patrikis got CEO Martin Sullivan settled in (although that didn’t work out so well) then left in 2006 for a brief stint running the regulatory practice at Pillsbury. That lasted less than three years, as he joined White & Case in February 2009.
Sullivan is the one who promoted Kelly into the job. In her three years at the helm, she served under Sullivan, then Robert Willumstad, then Edward Liddy, then Robert Benmosche. That CEO job may be even more of a revolving door than the GC spot at Apple.
Anyway, we’ll be curious to see what sort of deal Russo works out. He was usually at the top of the GC compensation list, but fell off last year.
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