Maurice Greenberg - Much Hullaballoo About Nothing?

Looking at this link at Forbes, it's revealed that Maurice Greenberg, the CEO of AIG insurance, has raked in around $140 million dollars in the past five years.

This, despite his letter grade of "C" compared to the performance of other CEO's. OK, so Maurice makes a lot of money and isn't necessarily the best CEO - no problem.

But what is a problem is the fact that he's contradicted himself in a big way.

For those of you who don't know, Greenberg recently called plaintiff's lawyers "terrorists," and likened the need for tort reform to the war on terror. Maurice blames trial lawyers for the raise in insurance premiums across the country.

However, this completely contradicts his former position. In the mid eighties, when the insurance industry was in a similar crisis, most insurance companies blamed trial lawyers, and pushed for tort reform. A notable exception to this was Maurice, who was the CEO of AIG even then.

In the March 31st, 1986 edition of Business Week, Greenberg said that the real problem was that insurance premium cuts in the early eighties were to blame, and if it weren't for these cuts, there wouldn't be "all this hullabaloo" about needing to reform the tort system. I guess Maurice took a lot of ribbing from his fellow insurance execs in the eighties for blaming the insurance industry instead of the plaintiff's bar.

What bothers me even more is that he accuses lawyers of being similar to terrorists, and then has the audacity to say this:

"When you destroy something you have to rebuild it, and when you rebuild it, you have to insure it. After the (first Gulf) war we benefited from a lot of reconstruction activities, and my guess is we will this time".

So, it's OK for AIG to "benefit" from a war on terrorism, but it's not OK for lawyers to bring suits against the big corporations AIG insures?