Hank Greenberg, with lead lawyer David Boies, independently sued the U.S. Government for money damages in the United States Court of Federal Claims in 2011. The AIG board had announced on January 9 that the company would not join the lawsuit. After hearing thirty-seven days of testimony from Ben Bernanke, Timothy Geithner, Hank Paulson and others, Judge Thomas C. Wheeler ruled that the Federal Reserve payment to AIG had been an illegal exaction, as the Federal Reserve Act did not authorize the New York Fed to nationalize a corporation by owning its stock. Judge Wheeler did not award compensation to the plaintiffs, ruling that they did not suffer economic damage because "if the government had done nothing, the shareholders would have been left with 100 percent of nothing."