"...and negotiating for the company will be Bobo the chimp."

The big international insurance company AIG made the news again this weekend. No, they didn’t require another round of taxpayer funded bailout money. The $170 billion pumped in during the last three rounds seemed to have stabilized the patient for the time being.

The news this weekend was that AIG was going to pay out $450 million in “retention bonuses” to employees throughout the organization. These bonuses were apparently written into the employment contracts for executives at the various business units that make up AIG.

The amazing part about this is that $165 million of the retention bonus pool is allocated to the people at AIG’s financial products unit in London. These were the brainiacs who made all the bad deals that sunk AIG into such dire straits that they needed the $170 billion in the first place. Apparently the lawyers at AIG headquarters reviewed the employment contracts and concluded, “yup, we gotta pay ‘em.”

These guys in London inked deals that went bad to the tune of $60 billion in the last three months of 2008 alone. But they held their heads high and refused to quit, so by making it to the end of the year, they qualify for “retention bonuses.”

Who writes these contracts? This is the worst case of “head I win, tails you lose” I’ve seen all year.

According to news reports, the retention plan was set up early in 2008, before the realization set in about how bad the losses on the credit default swaps engineered at the financial products unit were going to be. AIG wanted to keep a number of executives from leaving, so the plan was set up to pay retention payments to senior people.

Call me crazy, but I’m not sure I’d want to keep the people around who wrecked the company and wiped out the shareholders. And the people who wrecked the company are still on the payroll, because they have a contract. For some reason, their business performance didn’t qualify as grounds for termination.

It kind of makes you wonder what you have to do to be fired for poor performance. Do you think being caught on videotape cutting a deal with Satan to sell him the souls of your customers would do it? Or would that qualify you for an additional bonus payment for “out of the box” thinking?

I wish I could get my hands on one of those contracts and see what it really says.