WASHINGTON (AP) — The man who built insurance giant American International Group Inc. from a startup to a global behemoth said he didn't mismanage the company — but the US government did.

Following weeks of public and congressional outrage over the largest corporate failure in US history, Maurice (Hank) Greenberg, AIG's chief executive until March 2005, said taxpayers got a raw deal in the largest bailout of the financial crisis.

Testifying before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee yesterday, Greenberg said his team had "nothing to do" with failures that so far have cost more than $182 billion. But he said the government's actions since taking over the company have left taxpayers with a nearly 80 percent stake "in a steadily diminishing asset" and no good exit strategy.

Greenberg, 83, said he never would have made the disastrous decision to sell hundreds of billions of dollars in guarantees for corporate and consumer debt.

"When I left the company, it was a healthy company," Greenberg said, citing its strong earnings and share price at the time. He did not discuss liabilities AIG was accumulating on its balance sheet through derivatives and a securities lending business.

In essence, AIG lent its triple-A credit rating to other companies for a small charge so they could reinvest money spent on securities backed by mortgages and other debt. When it lost that rating, it was forced to put up billions in collateral.

Greenberg blamed his successors for all of New York City-based AIG's problems. He said they recklessly abandoned "comprehensive and conservative" risk management procedures that he and his executive team employed.

"AIG's business model did not fail; its management did," Greenberg said. He went on to criticise his successors' handling of the financial products division, which he said "functioned quite well" under his leadership. That division wrote the notorious credit-default swaps that have forced the company to pay about $50 billion to US and foreign banks.

Financial products was "an informal kind of joint venture," but it was tied to his risk management policies, Greenberg said. He said the division doubled in size in the nine months after he left. But he accepted no blame for the failure to offset risk on billions of dollars in derivatives the company sold during his 38-year tenure.

AIG is so sprawling, and so intertwined with banks and other market players, that its failure could upend the global financial system.

Longtime AIG critic Rep. Elijah Cummings, (Democrat, Maryland), rejected Greenberg's finger-pointing.

"I'm convinced that the systemic problems at AIG go far deeper than mistakes made in the four years since you left the company," Cummings said. "What you failed to mention was that a good portion of those risky (bets) were written" before Greenberg's 2005 departure.

Cummings asked multiple times how many of the credit-default swaps were written while Greenberg was in charge.

"The amount we wrote was for European banks," Greenberg replied. "As far as I know, there was never a loss on any of that."

The swaps are commonly used contracts to insure against the default of financial instruments such as bonds and corporate debt. But they also are bought and sold as bets against bond defaults.

Besides forcing AIG's rescue, they played a prominent role in the credit crisis that brought the downfall last year of investment firm Lehman Brothers Holdings and Merrill Lynch & Co. selling itself to Bank of America Corp.

Greenberg repeatedly said the company's strong credit rating, which persisted until his departure, meant he had less cause to worry about risk AIG was taking on.

Greenberg, who is AIG's largest shareholder, spent the bulk of his testimony alleging flaws in the government's handling of the bailout, which has been restructured four times.

"That plan has failed," he said, adding that the company never should have funnelled the $50 billion to banks it had deals with, and the government should have focused on keeping the company strong rather than splitting it up.

"The goal of government should not be to liquidate large companies that have demonstrated they can succeed if properly managed," Greenberg said. "It should be to restore them so that they can be employers and taxpayers."