BizJournals Portfolio
Mar 29 2009 1:08pm EDT

Whining Executive of the Day, AIG Financial Products Edition

Executives at AIG Financial Products are not happy bunnies these days, and they're starting to make their views public. Jake DeSantis, for instance, published his resignation letter as a NYT op-ed. But Paul Harriman and his wife, Jan Ellen Harriman, clearly don't have that kind of access. So they're blogging at Livejournal instead.

John Carney at Clusterstock found Jan Ellen's blog on Friday and her husband's on Saturday. Today he reprints Paul's latest blog entry, since Paul has now put it behind a firewall. It echoes his wife's in all its main points: he worked very hard, and London is very expensive (he's paying rent of $10,000 a month and school fees of $30,000 a year) and he needs that bonus to cover his annual expenses.

There's also this:

We've been forbidden to speak to the press, by a company that obviously hates us and spreads false and misleading "information" about us, when they can be arsed to respond at all.

I think it's fair to say that morale at AIG Financial Products is low -- but not quite as low as the self-awareness of an executive who genuinely thinks that if you live in London you need to pay $10,000 a month in rent, and who also seems to think that joining his wife in ranting on Livejournal is in any sense a good idea.

So a word of advice for any other AIGFP executive who's tempted to go public bemoaning the loss of his bonus and his livelihood: don't. You are hated already, and this kind of display, with ten parts self-pity to zero parts contrition, doesn't help you out in the slightest.


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