NEW YORK (Reuters) - Maurice Greenberg, whose American International Group Inc. has paid out hundreds of millions of dollars in claims from corporate scandals, said yesterday that recent reforms only diverted executives' attention from day-to-day business and did nothing to prevent corporate crime.

Greenberg, AIG's long-time chairman and the leading voice in the global insurance industry, joined a growing chorus of disapproval from chief executives. Last month the Business Roundtable, the lobby group for CEOs, voiced its opposition to further reforms proposed by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

"The amount of time CEOs spend on corporate governance has taken away from the job of entertaining risk," Greenberg told CEOs gathered at the annual International Insurance Society seminar in New York.

US executives are busy getting into line with last year's Sarbanes-Oxley Act and face further rules - such as maintaining independent majority boards - from the New York Stock Exchange.

"There is no empirical evidence that an outside board of directors will do better than insiders," Greenberg railed, saying that the presence of outside directors had not prevented scandals at Enron Corp., WorldCom Inc. and Tyco International Ltd. AIG, which elected a majority independent board for the first time in 2001, generated the vast majority of its shareholder value with a majority of insiders on its board, Greenberg said.

"You can't legislate crime out of existence," said Greenberg, whose company has paid out million of dollars in directors' and officers' claims for wayward companies sued by shareholders.