John Thain yesterday tried to wrest his reputation out of a Bair trap.
The CIT Group CEO yesterday said he brought up executive compensation at the time his firm was getting bailed out by taxpayers not for selfish reasons but to determine how much control Washington would have over his company.
“One of the issues we were worried about at the time was, if you take government money how much say does the government have in how you run your business?” Thain said during an interview on CNBC.
Days earlier, Thain was trashed by former bank regulator Sheila Bair, who, in her upcoming book, “Bull By the Horns,” accuses the Wall Street veteran of being fixated on pay during the height of the financial Armageddon.
Bair, the former Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. boss, wrote that Thain “was desperate for capital but was worried about restrictions on executive compensation.”
“I could not believe it. Where were this guy’s priorities?” she wrote, referring to Thain.
The CEO, who was tapped to run the troubled lender in 2010, also addressed during the CNBC interview rumors that CIT was looking to sell itself to a large bank.
“It’s absolutely not true,” Thain said yesterday.
Shares of CIT, which had jumped 6 percent on Sept. 24 when the rumor hit, slipped marginally yesterday to $39.90 before Thain’s late afternoon comments.
In after-hours trading, CIT shares fell an additional 1.1 percent.
Thain said he’d reduced debt at the lender by about $31 billion and lowered its cost of funding to 1.1 percent.
Thain took over CIT after an unsuccessful restructuring of its debt — led by another Merrill alum Jeff Peek — resulted in the firm filing for bankruptcy, even after accepting a $2.28 billion government lifeline.