US SENATOR SAYS PAY CZAR SHOULD RECOVER BONUSES

A New York Democratic Party Senator has said that US "pay czar" Kenneth Feinberg should be given legislative powers to recover bonuses paid to AIG executives past and present. Speaking on Bloomberg Television, Senator Charles Schumer said that the AIG executives "were supposed to return them. They said they would return them. Now many of them are not with the company". Neil Barofsky, the special inspector-general for the US government bailouts, has said that, of $45m in bonus payments which executives had pledged to pay back — an offer made after New York Attorney-General Andrew Cuomo had threatened to release the AIG executives' names to the public — only $19m had actually been returned. In October Mr Feinberg wrote to AIG chief executive Robert Benmosche, noting that four of the top five executives at AIG Financial Products had promised to repay bonuses received early in 2009, but that not one of them had done so.