Cuomo Comes After Bank of America Directors

Pity poor Bank of America. The biggest bank in the land keeps trying to leave the past behind it. It’s even coming out with a new, more consumer-friendly credit card to try to win back our love.

The card comes with only one page of conditions and a set interest rate. It’s just the kind of card pesky critics of the industry have been howling for for years.

But prosecutors and judges keep dragging up the unpleasant circumstances surrounding BofA’s acquisition of Merrill Lynch. You know: How the bank's leadership didn't exactly let shareholders know before the merger vote about just how much money Merrill was losing, or the billions in bonuses Merrill planned to hand out to executives. Those circumstances.

Earlier this week, it was the pesky Federal District Judge Jed Rakoff who refused to go along with a $33 million settlement that would have put the bank’s problems over the Merrill deal with the Securities Exchange Commission behind it.

The regulators had agreed to the settlement. Settlements like it happen all the time. But this judge said no. He even ordered the bank and the regulators to get ready for a trial over bank officials failing to disclose the little matter of all those Merrill losses and Merrill bonuses to shareholders before they voted on the merger last year.

Now, to add insult to injury, Andrew Cuomo, the New York Attorney General who hasn’t been able to just let this whole merger thing go, is out there issuing subpoenas for former bank directors. He wants to know what they knew about the Merrill losses and the Merrill bonuses.

Cuomo’s been up there in Albany causing problems for Bank of America for a while. He even dragged CEO Ken Lewis into court to testify about what he knew and when he knew it in the Merrill case, and about what kind of pressure Lewis was under from then Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke to get the deal done at almost any cost.

And he’s been threatening for some time to bring charges against the bank’s officials over the Merrill deal.

Now, Cuomo is coming after five directors who served on the bank’s audit committee at the time of the merger. The attorney general wants to know, he says, whether they, "protected the rights of shareholders, were they misled, or were they little more than rubber stamps for management`s decisionmaking?"

It’s all enough to make you wonder: Why can’t these truth-and-justice people just let poor Bank of America be?