Move Over Goldman Sachs, AIG Settles With Ohio For $725 Million

The American International Group, Inc. (“AIG”) and certain individual directors and officers have agreed to pay $725 million to settle a securities class action. That's a couple of hundred million more than Goldman Sachs agreed to pay to settle its problems with the SEC.

Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray says that the AIG settlement resolved allegations that AIG engaged in wide-ranging fraud from October 1999 to April 2005 involving anti-competitive market division, accounting violations, and stock price manipulation. The settlement, which is subject to court approval, brings total expected recovery for AIG shareholders to over $1 billion. 

Three Ohio public pension funds, represented by the Attorney General (who was represented by the law firms of Labaton Sucharow and Hahn Loeser & Parks), led the class action suit:  the Ohio Public Employees Retirement System, the State Teachers Retirement System of Ohio and the Ohio Police and Fire Pension Fund.
 
As part of the case involving AIG, the three Ohio funds and the Ohio Attorney General’s Office previously announced a $72 million settlement with General Reinsurance Corporation, a $97.5 million settlement with PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP and a $115 million settlement with CEO Maurice R. "Hank" Greenberg and other AIG executives (Howard I. Smith, Christian M. Milton and Michael J. Castelli) and related corporate entities (C.V. Starr & Co., Inc. and Starr International Co., Inc.).
 
AIG has agreed to pay $725 million to the shareholder class in the primary settlement. An initial payment of $175 million will be payable after entry of a court order granting preliminary approval of the settlement. The remaining $550 million may be funded by AIG through one or more common stock offerings. If AIG does not fund the $550 million before court approval of the settlement, the plaintiffs may terminate the agreement, elect to acquire freely transferable shares of AIG common stock with a market value of $550 million provided AIG is able to obtain all necessary approvals, or extend the period for AIG to complete a stock offering in order to fund the remainder of the settlement.
 
This case involved three types of allegations:
 
·         that AIG engaged in accounting fraud, culminating in a $3.9 billion restatement in May 2005 that included numerous different types of transactions, including allegations relating to a $500 million no-risk fraudulent reinsurance transaction that AIG entered into with General Reinsurance Corp. in order to artificially boost AIG's reported claims reserves. According to Cordray, one AIG executive and four Gen Re executives were found guilty of securities fraud in relation to that transaction;
·         that AIG paid tens of millions of dollars in undisclosed contingent commissions to insurance brokers and participated in a bid-rigging scheme with insurance brokers and certain insurance companies in order to divide the market for certain types of insurance; and
·         that AIG engaged in straightforward stock price manipulation, in which company executives ordered company traders to inflate AIG stock price.