Shell Games

By Lucy Komisar, CorpWatch. Posted November 22, 2004.

In October, New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer filed suit against the world's largest insurance broker, Marsh, accusing it of rigging bids and receiving kickbacks in order to defraud clients such as other corporations, city governments, school districts and individuals of billions of dollars through inflated premiums.

"Greedy trial lawyers were the usual excuse for premium increases. Now we know that greedy corporations also have a starring role," Spitzer said, accusing several insurance companies as co-conspirators in making phony or inflated bids and paying kickbacks to the brokerage to get business.

Spitzer also announced that two executives from the insurance conglomerate American International Group (AIG) had already confessed to related criminal charges. But his investigations into AIG may have only scratched the surface. A paper trail stretching back a decade reveals that AIG used offshore shell companies to skirt the law.

The current scam which Spitzer has uncovered works like this: Marsh, an insurance broker, is supposed to find the best insurance policies for its clients from a wide range of companies. Instead it steered the policies to companies such as AIG that agreed to pay kickbacks. It solicited phony competitive bids for insurance contracts to deceive customers into thinking there was real competition for their business. Marsh made $800 million on kickbacks in 2003 alone – over half its $1.5 billion profit. With a 40 percent share of the global insurance brokerage market, its fraud drove up prices for everyone.

AIG announced that its senior managers were not aware of the bid-rigging. But the family ties of three of the alleged co-conspirators make the claim hard to believe. The head of the Marsh brokerage was Jeffrey Greenberg, 53; the head of AIG is his father Maurice (Hank) Greenberg. A former AIG staffer told CorpWatch, "Greenberg is legendary as a hands-on person. Nothing happens in the company without him dealing with it. He knows the names of the elevator operators."

Another accused collaborator is Hank's other son, Evan, 49 who just happens to run ACE Ltd., another of the companies allegedly involved in the complex scam.

Jeffrey has resigned in disgrace, but so far the family patriarch is holding onto his executive seat. During a conference call with investors, he said, "I have never discussed business with Jeff or with Evan. ... We get together on a very rare occasion. But we never discuss business. We play tennis occasionally." Still, fallout from the scandal has already cut $24 billion from AIG's $150 billion market capitalization and knocked 12 percent off its stock price.

Lax Regulators Give AIG a Free Pass

At Spitzer's press conference, New York State Insurance Superintendent Gregory V. Serio said: "This has gone from an inquiry into failure to disclose compensation to an active investigation of bid rigging and improper steering. This certainly proves the adage that where there is smoke, there is fire." But AIG's comportment could not have been much of a surprise to Serio, who was New York's deputy insurance superintendent in the late 1990s. That's when New York and three other states gave the powerful company a pass on some very questionable practices. If they had paid attention to the smoke then, perhaps this billion-dollar fire wouldn't have ignited.

In the late 1990s, four state insurance departments New York, Delaware, Pennsylvania and California were aware that AIG was moving debt off its books via the use of an offshore shell company it secretly set up and controlled. But despite clear evidence of wrongdoing, no sanctions were ordered.

Insurance companies normally insure themselves by laying off part of their risk to reinsurance companies, so if a claim comes in above a certain amount, the reinsurance company will pay it. Insurance companies use re-insurers to reduce some of their risk and because state laws require them to keep a certain amount of capital available to pay out claims. If they have reinsurance, that amount can drop. If they have enough good reinsurance, they get a credit for that against their losses. The reinsurer, of course, has to be an independent company; the risk isn't reduced if it's just moved to another division of the same company.

In the mid-1980s, two of AIG's reinsurers failed. The bankruptcy liquidators paid creditors, including AIG, over several years but meanwhile the amount owed was liable to show up as unacceptably high levels of debt on the AIG books.

Trevor Jones, an insurance investigator who for 20 years has run Insurance Security Services in London, explained, "Hank [Greenberg] decided to set up Coral Re [a reinsurance company] to move the debts he couldn't claim as assets into this other company ... No other real company would play ball, because you are fiddling the accounts, moving your bad debts off your books."

Lucy Komisar is an investigative journalist who is writing a book about offshore bank and corporate secrecy. She received research assistance on this report from the Arkansas Committee. The committee was started in 1990 by University of Arkansas students, who, suspicious that Arkansas Development Finance Authority was selling more bonds than it could use to finance state projects, demanded the agency's documents under the Freedom of Information Act. It fought the case to the Arkansas Supreme Court before it got the papers describing the AFDA deal to buy shares of Coral Re.

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