Just six months after being hailed as a strategic wunderkind for his successful bid for investment bank Merrill Lynch, Bank of America CEO Kenneth Lewis has come under intense fire for the deal, with one shareholder calling for his resignation as company chairman. Reuters reports that investor Jerry Finger is running his own informal campaign against Lewis, calling on other shareholders to join him in his fight.
Finger, whose family owns approximately 1.5 million BofA shares, alleges that Lewis took on a too-large chunk of risk by acquiring Merrill in January. He has also filed a separate lawsuit that alleges BofA executives and directors concealed crucial information related to Merrill’s Q4 2008 losses until after the December 5 shareholder vote to approve the merger.
Merrill suffered a fourth-quarter loss of $15 billion, revealed after the merger went through. Critics allege that BofA executives kept hidden the information related to these losses until after shareholders approved the merger.
BofA’s annual meeting will fall on April 29, at which point shareholders will consider a number of proposals, including whether to put an independent director in the place of Lewis’s chairman spot. Though Finger will not run a formal proxy solicitation in his efforts to displace Lewis, he is filing a notice with regulators that will allow him to run a “vote no” campaign against the current CEO.