Lawmaker: may have been "collusion" in BofA deal

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The chairman of a U.S. House of Representatives committee said on Thursday there may have been collusion in the Bank of America merger with Merrill Lynch.

"I'm not sure there was not some collusion here," the chairman of the Oversight and Government Reform panel, Edolphus Towns, told Reuters television, talking about the deal that authorities pressured Bank of America not to back out of after big losses came to light at Merrill.

"We notice that all these people, they know each other, they served on boards, they were on the compensation boards and things together," the New York Democrat said after hearing testimony from former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson on the government's role in the transaction.

(Reporting by Mark Felsenthal; Editing by Dan Grebler)