He's back.
Most of us probably won't remember Maurice Greenberg. He was the guy who turned AIG from just another insurance company into -- and he may say this with pride -- into a disaster too big to fail.
He's 83 now. He retired as AIG's CEO in 2005 -- well, he got the boot after being caught up in accounting fraud by Eliot Spitzer. Now, at 83, he's getting back in the game, according to the New York Times.
He's starting AIG2.
Even as he has been lambasting the government for its handling of A.I.G. after its near collapse, Mr. Greenberg has been quietly building up a family of insurance companies that could compete with A.I.G. To fill the ranks of his venture, C.V. Starr & Company, he has been hiring some people he once employed.
Doesn't federal law provide some sort of legal whac-a-mole device for Wall Street geniuses like Greenberg? Not really. In fact the government may have inadvertently helped him, big time. When the administration decided to go after executive pay in companies the taxpayer bailed out, they may have handed a bunch of AIG managers -- "talent," the Times calls them -- over to Greenberg.
“Basically, he’s just starting ‘A.I.G. Two’ and raiding people out of ‘A.I.G. One,’ ” said Douglas A. Love, an insurance executive who has also hired A.I.G. talent for his company, Investors Guaranty Fund of Pembroke, Bermuda.
While America generally loves stories of entrepreneurs making a comeback, Mr. Greenberg’s success may be at the expense of taxpayers. People who work in the industry say that if he is already luring A.I.G.’s people, he may soon be siphoning off its business and, therefore, its means to repay its debt to the government.
Perhaps we can look forward to Bernie Madoff's release on parole and the development of a new enterprise, Madoff2?
