Bank Of America's Ken Lewis To Retire At End Of Year

Ken Lewis, the controversial CEO of Bank of America, will resign at the end of the year.

Lewis, 62, was a lifer at BofA, working there for 41 years and was widely viewed until recently as an unalloyed American success story, the son of a single mother living in Walnut Grove, Mississippi, he eventually became one of the most powerful men in global finance.

He lost some of his gloss amid the chaos of the financial crisis. He oversaw BofA's purchases of both troubled mortgage giant Countrywide and stricken investment banker-brokerage Merrill Lynch.

The Merrill acquisition has caused huge headaches for Lewis. BofA was sued by the Securities and Exchange Commission which alleged that both BofA and Merrill misled investors about huge executive bonuses paid to Merrill employees at the same time BofA was getting billions of dollars in taxpayer money through the Troubled Asset Relief Program.

BofA settled with the SEC but a federal judge threw out the settlement as insufficient.

 

The company has a press release with a statement from Lewis on its website. An excerpt:

"Bank of America is well positioned to meet the continuing challenges of the economy and markets," said Lewis. "I am particularly heartened by the results that are emerging from the decisions and initiatives of the difficult past year-and-a-half."

"The Merrill Lynch and Countrywide integrations are on track and returning value already," Lewis noted. "Our board of directors and our senior management include more talent, and more diversity of talent, than at any time in this company's history. We are in position to begin to repay the federal government's TARP investments. For these reasons, I decided now is the time to begin to transition to the next generation of leadership at Bank of America."