This story has been updated
Today the Wall Street Journal has a story showing how Darien banker William Bryan Jennings got totally screwed over by Morgan Stanley after he was arrested for a hate crime the state of Connecticut laterdropped. One of my readers had commented last month in some of the stories I’d written about Jennings that the investment bank he spent two decades with wasn’t going to pay him millions in deferred compensation. I tried to follow-up on that news but it looks like the WSJ beat me to it.
You see most bank executives don’t get their full bonuses when they are awarded each year. The bank usually sets up a 2-3 year deferred stock payout to keep great performers in their job. Jennings was one of those bankers who has now learned bad pr for him equals Morgan Stanley is going to take the opportunity to not fork over millions in pay he previously earned. The Journal says Jennings wasn’t fired until October – a few weeks before all charges were dropped. Morgan Stanley claims they can fire him because his actions hurt the firm even though his job performance isn’t why he’d be fired. Sounds like a totally BS excuses to me. What’s also troubling is the CT assistant States attorney, Weiss, waited until October to drop the charges when he knew in May the cabbie had lied about having the weapon all along — in May Jennings was still employed by Morgan Stanley.
Officials at the firm believe it owes him nothing, citing “clawback” provisions that allow the company to withhold or seize pay from employees who hurt Morgan Stanley, wrote Aaron Lucchetti for the Wall Street Journal
The story was clearly leaked to the WSJ by a public relations person Jennings has hired as he is currently negotiating with Morgan Stanley to get paid. But if negotiations were going well this story wouldn’t have been leaked; so there is strong chance we’ll see Jennings sue the bank over the termination. Of course if he does that he better secure a good settlement figure because no other bank is going to hire him.
As I’ve previously written, CT civil rights lawyers think Jennings has a decent case to sue the town of Darien for the police actions in a wrongful arrest and thus a violation of his civil liberties. And now that we know he also lost a job, that paid millions each year, for a bad arrest what’s holding him back?
UPDATE 12-19-12 5:30pm: Darien Times got Jennings to pick up the phone and he told them ‘Yea my former employer does owe me a lot of money which kind of sucks’ – to see Jennings exact quote go read David DesRoches story.
Source: Teri Buhl
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