“Jack Lew is the nominee for Treasury secretary whose own bonus as an investment banker was bailed out by the Treasury Department when it rescued Citigroup Inc. in 2008. He owes much to America’s taxpayers. He should also be grateful to Citigroup for agreeing to let him rejoin the government without suffering much for it financially.

“An intriguing revelation from Lew’s Senate confirmation hearing last week was that he stood to be paid handsomely by Citigroup if he left the company for a top U.S. government job, under his 2006 employment agreement with the bank. The wording of the pay provisions made it seem, at least to me, as if Citigroup might have agreed to pay Lew some sort of a bounty to seek out, and be appointed to, such a position.

“Lew didn’t shed much light on the subject after Senator Orrin Hatch, a Utah Republican, asked him about it at the hearing. “I’m not familiar with records that were kept, so I don’t have access to things that I don’t know about,” Lew said. It wasn’t clear which records (or even which question) Lew was referring to, and Hatch didn’t press the matter.”

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Read full Bloomberg article here