AIG bailout for two more years

AIG chief executive Robert Benmosche says it will take at least two years for AIG to sell businesses and earn enough profits to repay the government and persuade it to sell its 80% stake, the FT reports.

“When I got here, it was every man for himself: ‘separation’, ‘divestiture’, ‘the company’s dead’. People began to see their businesses erode. It’s hard to be a client of a company when everybody’s thinking of leaving,” he says in a lengthy interview.

“I felt that the way the people of AIG were vilified was wrong ... When I meet people and they tell me they were afraid to leave their children in their own homes, that their children were beaten up at school or embarrassed in classrooms, I think that’s wrong,” he says. “I was aggressive about that, because you can’t treat these people this way.”

“The problem for me was that, if the sum of the parts is less than the whole, and the whole is what you need to pay back the government, it’s not going to work ... So the strategy wasn’t nuts. What was nuts was the speed at which we were attempting to do it”.