AIG to sell foreign life insurance arm for $15.5bn

AIG, which last week agreed to sell AIA, its Asian life business, to Prudential for $35.5bn, has agreed final terms for the disposal of to sell its overseas life and health insurance arm Alico to MetLife for $15.5bn.

The deal, which was announced yesterday – after weeks of intense negotiations and over a year of talks – will provide AIG $6.8bn in cash, with the remaining $8.7bn coming in MetLife shares and options.

The deal will see AIG ending up with a 20pc stake in MetLife, making it the company's second-biggest shareholder, and giving US taxpayers – who control 80pc of AIG's shares – a stake in a second major US insurer.

The cash will be added to the $25bn cash it will receive on completion of the AIA sale, and means the troubled insurer will be able to significantly pay down the credit line it has with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

At the end of December, AIG owed $47.3bn to the US Treasury, and $47.9bn to the new York Fed.

"Both sales give AIG greater flexibility to move forward with our restructuring and rebuilding efforts," said Harvey Golub, AIG's chairman.

Like AIA, which AIG had considered floating in Asia, Alico had been the subject of internal discussions regarding a stock market listing in New York since at least July last year.

The discussions continued in spite of talks with MetLife over Alico, which began in early 2009 under former chairman Ed Liddy's tenure, and restarted in the late summer, by which point Mr Golub and AIG chief executive Bob Benmosche had been appointed.

Mr Benmosche ran MetLife from 1998 until 2006, and was responsible for taking it public in 2000. However, he was not part of the Alico sale talks.

Alico, which began life in Shanghai in 1921, has 20m customers in more than 50 countries, with significant operations in central and eastern Europe as well as Latin America and the Middle East, plus Japan and the UK.
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