The executives of Washington Mutual Bank reached a deal with the Federal Deposit Insurance Commission (FDIC) today and it is only costing them pennies on the dollar.

The FDIC had brought a civil action against former Washington Mutual executives Kerry Killinger, Stephen Rotella and David Schneider for $900 million dollars back in March, accusing them with “gross negligence” and “breach of fiduciary duty,” in taking “extreme and historically unprecedented risks with WaMu’s held-for-investment home loans portfolio,” and saying the executives “focused on short term gains to increase their own compensation, with reckless disregard for WaMu’s longer term safety and soundness.”

The settlement was reached for $75 Million dollars with the large bulk of the money coming from the company’s insurers and from their bankruptcy estate.  The executives seem to have avoided jail in the settlement as prosecutors will forgo pressing criminal charges.

CitiBank executives were not as lucky.  They had offered to pay the FDIC $284 Million to settle similar charges with the Security Exchange Commission, but the settlement was rejected by U.S. District Judge Jed S. Rakoff. He refused to allow CitiBank executives off the hook without them offering some level of admission of wrongdoing.  Judge Rakoff had said that the settlement was “neither reasonable, nor fair, nor adequate, nor in the public interest,” .

Do you think that executives should be let off the hook with only fines for causing the financial meltdown of 2008?

Washington Mutual Execs Reach Deal With FDIC is a post from: The Inquisitr

CEO of one of the world’s largest investment banks, Lazard Ltd, has died.

Bruce Wasserstein, 61, was admitted to the hospital three days ago for arrhythmia, and was said to be in serious but stable condition. Wasserstein, a graduate of Harvard and Brooklyn native, had a 40-year run on Wall Street, brokering over 1,000 transactions worth more than $250 billion. Wasserstein worked on the Time/Warner Brothers merger, as well as the deal combining Morgan Stanley and Dean Witter. In the days before his hospitalization and eventual death, Wasserstein was working on Kraft’s bid to take over the UK’s top candy brand, Cadbury.

News of Wasserstein’s death hit press just after the bell on Wednesday. Wasserstein has an estimated net worth of over two billion dollars. He is survived by fourth wife Angela Chao, to whom he was married since January, 2009. Lazard is currently declining to comment on the death of their CEO.

[TimesOnline]

Lazard CEO Bruce Wasserstein dead at 61 is a post from: The Inquisitr

Twitter desktop application TweetDeck raised several million dollars this past July and now according to SEC filings the company has just received an additional $1.5 million towards a debt raise of $1.8 million dollars.

The new funding comes after $300K round of seed funds that came in January from New York tech investor Betaworks. Betaworks is also responsible for part of the funding in this new round of cash.

Also contributing to the new round of funding is PRO Founders Capital, Danny Rimer, Index Ventures, Ron Conway and Tag Ventures. [via PaidContent]

TweetDeck Picks Up $1.5 Million In Latest Round Of Funding is a post from: The Inquisitr

The G-Team announced the launch of up-to-the-second updates on NASDAQ securities at its official blog this afternoon. Engineers say real-time data has historically been limited to subscription-based services and brokers, leaving outside sites with delays as long as 20 minutes.

Google has been working on making the information more widely accessible for months. Product managers first blogged about their efforts back in January of last year.

Google Breaks Real-Time Stock Barrier is a post from: The Inquisitr