After a Missed Deadline, a Bank of America Concession

Today was the day Bank of America was supposed to finally reveal the secrets it has kept about its merger deal with Merrill Lynch. Well, maybe not so much.

A midday deadline to turn over documents about the deal to a Congressional committee came and went, and still no documents. (Please see the update at the bottom of this post).

So House Oversight and Government Reform Committee chairman Edolphus Towns takes his place along with New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo and others waiting to see what the bank has to say about who knew what about Merrill Lynch’s losses and the bonuses it planned to pay before shareholders voted on the merger.

"We are working with the committee on a plan to provide them with the information they need," Bank of America spokesman Scott Silvestri told Reuters in an emailed statement.

But noon was the deadline, and it came and went, and Bank of America, “did not comply with the deadline,” said a spokeswoman for Towns.

Towns committee is investigating details of the bank’s purchase of Merrill Lynch, and it wants to know about disclosure of premerger losses at Merrill, funding commitments from the U.S. government prior to the deal, and what legal basis the bank may have had for backing out.

Cuomo has wondered about some of the same questions and has grilled the bank’s CEO, Kenneth Lewis, about the merger. He now plans to question members of the bank’s board about the merger, and he has threatened that charges may be on the way for Bank of America and its officers.

The bank has cited lawyer-client privilege for refusing to produce some of the information investigators seek.

The SEC reached a deal with the bank under which the bank would pay $33 million to make the issue of who knew what and when before the Merrill deal go away. But a Federal Judge Jed Rakoff refused to accept the settlement and ordered the bank and the SEC to get ready for a trial.

It’s starting to look a lot like Bank of America and Ken Lewis have become the target of choice for all the anger still floating around about the near-collapse of the U.S. financial system.

UPDATE: More than a day after the deadline passed, Representative Towns said he had a "constructive" meeting with Bank of America officials. “The Bank agreed to provide the Committee with the remainder of the documents we originally requested on August 6, 2009, except for those over which they are asserting attorney-client privilege. For those documents, Bank of America will provide a privilege log that we will review and use to determine which documents are critical to the Committee’s ongoing investigation," Towns said in a statement.