Republican lawmakers on Tuesday grilled the Treasury Department official in charge of reining in excessive pay at bailed out companies who signed off on $8 million in compensation last year for the chief executive of bankrupt subprime mortgage lender Residential Capital LLC, Dow Jones Newswires reported yesterday. At the hearing before a House of Representatives oversight panel, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) took aim at special paymaster Patricia Geoghegan who approved $8 million in compensation for ResCap Chief Executive Tom Marano just weeks before the company filed for chapter 11. "The salary was at the request of ResCap board of directors," said Geoghegan. The hearing comes on the heels of a report by the special inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, Christy Romero, which was highly critical of the government’s failure to keep a lid on executives' pay at Ally, AIG and General Motors. AIG repaid its bailout last year, leaving GM and Ally the only two companies still subject to pay oversight.
