John Thain: “Hey, It Was Ken Lewis’s Fault Too! Can Someone Hire Me Now?”

John Thain, the ousted head of Merrill Lynch with a taste for soft furnishings a pimp might balk at as being “too showy”, has come out fighting this morning in the Wall Street Journal. He’s trying to set a number of things straight regarding the takeover of Merrill by Bank of America, and the rather aggrevating pot of bonuses that were paid out just before record losses were announced. 

Bank of America, under Ken Lewis, originally claimed that Thain had kept them in the dark about Merrill’s losses, and that it was Thain’s decision to pay bonuses early. Thain contested this back in January when he got stung over his redecoration expenses, but clearly the accusation is still smarting because he’s contesting it again today: “The suggestion Bank of America was not heavily involved in this process, and that I alone made these decisions, is simply not true”. In other words: “it wasn’t just me that decided on an unsustainable program of compensation, it was Ken Lewis as well!”

Thain says that he was “stunned” by Financial Times reports that he had “decided” to speed up bonus payments to happen before the merger of the two bank. But let’s read between the lines here – he wasn’t stunned that he was being accused of having sped up the passage of bonuses, he was stunned because he was being solely accused, and by Bank Of America, who he charges as being co-conspirators in the early payments. Well, I’m sure that’s pretty galling for him, but for the rest of humanity it doesn’t change a thing – he’s still the architect of a cynical, damaging ploy to squeeze as much personal cash and stock from the deal as possible.

That said, let’s not let BoA’s attempts to get off the hook (“We believe it is time to move on. We wish Mr. Thain well in his future endeavors”) gain any traction. That non-public document, signed by Lewis and Thain, that stated that Merrill could pay out bonuses before the merger was complete, should do the trick. Read the whole WSJ piece here, and a good timeline of the whole debacle on the Huffington Post here.

The image of the “radioactive” Thain painted in the WSJ, of him putting on a suit every day without a company to go and work for, is the tastiest morsel of schaudenfraude we’ve had for a while. Don’t miss out.

Posted by Ben Beaumont-Thomas in Hot Money | April 27, 2009 1:32PM |