AIG needs unified plan to recover: Greenberg

In his latest criticism of the insurer's management, Greenberg said AIG executives were at cross purposes.

Former American International Group CEO Maurice “Hank” Greenberg said the insurer could fall apart unless management quickly came up with a unified recovery plan.

“You can’t hold (together) an organization that is drifting in the way it is,” he said in an interview on Thursday. “It can be fixed now. I don’t know if that will be true in two to three months from now.”

In his latest criticism of the insurer’s management, Greenberg said AIG executives were at cross purposes.

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Chief Executive Edward Liddy has said he will retain AIG’s global property casualty insurance operations, and a stake in some of its flagship Asian life insurance operations.

AIG, once the world’s largest insurer, plans to shed other units to repay a $152 billion rescue package from the US government that saved it from collapse last month under bad mortgage bets.

However, Paula Rosput Reynolds, hired in October to oversee AIG’s restructuring, told the Wall Street Journal earlier this week that, if necessary, she would sell off every part of the company to repay the government.

“That is an outrage,” Greenberg said of the plan by Reynolds, former CEO of auto insurer Safeco. “All that does is tell everyone working there to start looking for a job, and why would business hang around?

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“It was bad enough that AIG was going to be shrunken.”

WHAT’S NEXT?

Greenberg, forced out of AIG in 2005 amid an accounting scandal, said more revisions to the government’s rescue plan were necessary or the insurer would soon be beyond repair.

Greenberg and companies he controls, C.V. Starr and Starr International, were AIG’s largest shareholders before the US bailout, which gave the government a 79.9 per cent stake in the New York-based company.

He said the government needs to guarantee contracts AIG wrote to cover mortgage debt, and cut its stake to one-fourth or less if it wants AIG to survive. The guarantees, he said — “not cash” — should be similar to ones extended to Citigroup (C.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz), in which the government would shoulder most losses on about $306 billion of the bank’s risky assets.

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“It is crucial there be a plan C,” or a third revision to a bailout first put in place in September, Greenberg said.

The initial $85 billion US bailout plan was revised in November to give AIG additional funding, easier terms and a promise to buy mortgage liabilities that have led the insurer to post losses of $42.5 billion over the past four quarters.