Waxman: Lehman CEO Not Cooperating With Me

As Congress and the President negotiate a gazillion dollar Wall Street bailout, the House oversight committee has launched an investigation into companies that have already failed, inlcuding investment bank Lehman Bros. But Henry Waxman, (D-Calif.) chair of the oversight committee, says that Lehman CEO Richard Fuld has not complied with a request to hand over company emails and documents from the past six months.

Fuld has told Waxman that the lack of emails is due to being “an infrequent email user.” But Lehman Bros has also said it can’t turn over other documents. Waxman writes in a letter to Fuld:

Your counsel and his team have also informed Committee staff that they do not currently plan to produce any documents sent, received, or reviewed by you during the past six months that are nonelectronic, such as internal memoranda from company officials, assessments of the company’s potential liabilities, or warnings of the company’s impending collapse. According to your counsel, although these documents did exist at one time, they were typically “discarded.”

Waxman is a little skeptical about this:

It is difficult to understand how Lehman Brothers is unable to produce a single internal document that went to or from the CEO’s office over the past six months. It is also difficult to understand why there is no log, file, or other record documenting where these internal documents went.

This week, the British bank Barclay’s purchased most of what is of left Lehman Brothers.

Fuld will testify to the oversight committee about his time as Lehman CEO Oct. 6, with or without documents.