AIG fired the former head of its legal operations center because he wouldn’t cooperate with the center’s reorganization, not because of his alleged whistleblowing activities, a federal trial court in New York said.
Aaron Katzel sued AIG under the Sarbanes Oxley Act and the Dodd-Frank Act, claiming he was fired in retaliation for blowing the whistle on the company’s violations of federal fraud and securities law.
But Katzel failed to establish a claim for whistleblower retaliation because he didn’t show he was engaged in protected activity or that AIG had knowledge of such activity, the Sept. 23 opinion by Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein of the US District Court for the Southern District of New York said. Nor did Katzel show he was terminated with retaliatory intent, the court said.
Katzel suggested that AIG grow the center and start offering its services managing legal expenses to outside customers, and starting in 2015, the company evaluated the proposal. But the evaluation process, which included input by outside contractors, discovered that the center’s in-office clients weren’t satisfied with its services.
Katzel complained to his superiors that the evaluation process wasn’t properly conducted and that one of the outside contractors had a conflict of interest. An investigation concluded that Katzel’s concerns lacked merit.
When the overall evaluation of the...
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