Reply #41: Fuld Understated Pay More Than $200 Million, Lehman’s Budde Says

[Demeter]

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601108&sid=aE9Y67JEld0E

Before Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. took his place, Richard S. Fuld Jr.’s angry face was the universal symbol of Wall Street greed.

On Oct. 6, 2008, three weeks after Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. filed the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history, Lehman’s former chief executive officer found himself before Representative Henry A. Waxman, the California Democrat who chaired the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Waxman has stared down plenty of CEOs over the years, yet this had to be one of the most intense confrontations of his career.

“Mr. Fuld will do fine,” Waxman said. “He can walk away from Lehman a wealthy man who earned over $500 million. But taxpayers are left with a $700 billion bill to rescue Wall Street and an economy in crisis.”

Fuld said he was a victim, not an architect, of the collapse, blaming a “crisis of confidence” in the markets for dooming his firm. Reckless management had nothing to do with it. “Lehman Brothers,” he said, “was a casualty.”

Fuld and Waxman went on to disagree about just how much money Fuld had taken out of Lehman before it went under, Bloomberg Businessweek reported in its May 3 edition. Fuld, now 64, said his total compensation from 2000 through 2007 was less than $310 million, not the $485 million that appeared on Waxman’s chart. He said 85 percent of his pay was in Lehman stock that had become worthless. “I never sold my shares,” Fuld said at one point. At another, he said he had not sold the “vast majority” of them.

“That just seems to me an incredible amount of money,” Waxman responded.

Under Oath

Among those closely observing Fuld was a 49-year-old former Lehman lawyer named Oliver Budde who was watching the hearing at home on C-Span. Budde (pronounced Boo-da) was certain Waxman’s figures weren’t too high. They were too low, and he could prove it. Fuld, he believed, had understated the amount he was paid during those years by more than $200 million, and now he had done it under oath, for the entire world to see....