When it comes to American International Group Inc., the insurance conglomerate he turned into a powerhouse, there isn’t much Maurice R. “Hank” Greenberg hasn’t fought over.
After he was forced out of the company, he battled over which files, mementos and antiques were his to keep. He filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the federal government’s bailout of AIG during the financial crisis.
Now, Mr. Greenberg, who is 93, is disputing AIG’s 100th birthday party.
AIG is celebrating what it calls its centennial anniversary this year, with an “AIG 100” website detailing its history and commemorative merchandise in the company store, among other activities.
“This is plain bullshit,” Mr. Greenberg says, sitting in an armchair in his office on Park Avenue in New York City, a space filled with photographs, awards and memorabilia that attest to many decades of insurance history.
Company anniversaries typically don’t generate attention, much less controversy. But Mr. Greenberg doesn’t think AIG is 100 years old and says some of its story is wrong. The spat pits the insurance giant against a man who fought in World War II, went on to take the company public, and worked there for nearly 40 years until he was pushed out in 2005.
AIG says it is 100 years old because it can trace its roots to a company founded in Shanghai in 1919.
Mr. Greenberg says AIG dates to just 1967—when he pulled together various operations that had grown from that original Shanghai company—to take public.
“You think I’m going to sit quietly by and let them take credit for being 100 years old? They’re not, and I know the answer to that because I formed AIG,” he says.
Mr. Greenberg says he has talked by phone twice to AIG’s current chief executive to complain, then cornered him at an industry dinner event—to no avail. His lawyer has compiled a list of what they consider inaccuracies in AIG’s story.
A mug that says “100 Years of Keeping Promises” sells for $4.45 on an AIG website, along with T-shirts, baseball caps, luggage tags and other items branded with the “AIG 100” logo.
Mr. Greenberg said AIG’s entire approach, merchandise included, “belittles them.”
AIG declined to comment on Mr. Greenberg’s assertions.
The AIG 100 website contains material from the company’s archives such as historical photos, past advertising that references milestones and newspaper clippings.
It says its story begins when Californian Cornelius Vander Starr stepped off a steamship in Shanghai in 1919 and began building an insurance business.
Back when Mr. Greenberg ran AIG, he noted that connection too—touting “our beginnings in Shanghai in 1919” and an entrepreneurial approach “over the course of 85 years” in a shareholder letter published in 2004.
Mr. Greenberg says the insurance business he has been expanding since he left AIG—known as Starr Cos.—is the legitimate claimant to the 100th anniversary. Starr Cos., not AIG, is the one which connects to the Shanghai start, he says.
He says AIG wrongly takes credit for innovation, strategy and derring-do that belongs to Mr. Starr, whom Mr. Greenberg worked for and then succeeded after his death in 1968. “I’ll defend his history against anybody that is trying to change it,” he says. He points to a framed photograph of Mr. Starr on a windowsill by his desk.
After he left AIG in 2005, he focused on building up privately held parts of Starr that hadn’t been incorporated into AIG.
“We’re competitors now,” Mr. Greenberg says of AIG, and key parts of the history “don’t get to stay with AIG.”
The dust-up started this month, when a Starr lawyer, who keeps track of the competition, observed the recently posted “AIG 100” pages.
The lawyer compiled a list of points in dispute. Mr. Greenberg says he hasn’t actually looked at the AIG 100 site himself, but among the items that jumped out at him in the lawyer’s report was this: “Founded by Cornelius Vander Starr in Shanghai in 1919, AIG had to leave China twice—once during WWII and once again following the Communist Revolution.”
“INCORRECT,” the report reads. “The Communist Revolution in China concluded on Oct. 1, 1949, and AIG would not exist for another 17 and ¾’s years.”
Mr. Greenberg says he told AIG Chief Executive Brian Duperreault in his first call: “To suggest AIG was founded in China and that AIG had to leave China during World War II is totally misleading. It’s make-believe. You have to correct it.”
According to Mr. Greenberg, Mr. Duperreault responded he would look into it. But when Mr. Greenberg followed up the next day, he says the CEO told him: “We’re not going to change it.” That evening, he says, Mr. Duperreault basically shrugged when Mr. Greenberg approached him at St. John’s University’s “Insurance Leader of the Year” annual awards dinner at a hotel in New York City.
To many who know Mr. Greenberg, confrontation isn’t surprising. Besides serving in WWII, he earned a Bronze Star in the Korean War. He took on the U.S. government in a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the federal government’s 2008 bailout of AIG. He won on a key point in a trial court, but the judge’s ruling was vacated.
Mr. Greenberg spent 12 years resisting allegations of improper accounting by former New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer. He has publicly criticized directors who didn’t defend him. In 2017, he paid $9 million in a mediated settlement to end the civil-fraud case. The state initially sought billions.
Mr. Greenberg’s Starr Cos. has hosted two centennial receptions of its own so far. In June, at the Park Avenue headquarters, Mr. Greenberg recalled the loyalty Mr. Starr inspired in his Chinese employees. Attendees received a 52-page booklet about Mr. Starr.
Some examples of language about AIG’s founding in Shanghai exist from Mr. Greenberg’s time there. “Did I see every piece of paper that went out? Obviously not. It was a huge insurance company,” he says.
Occasional such references could have been “a simple way of expressing” AIG’s history, but they aren’t correct and he wants them removed from the AIG 100 site, he says.
“We’ll do whatever we have to do to correct the misinformation,” he says.