NEW YORK (Bloomberg) — American International Group Inc., should be forced to turn over e-mail messages that may reveal new information on how the insurer collapsed in 2008 and who benefitted from a $182.3 billion US bailout, former New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer and two law professors wrote.

Such questions should be answered before the government sells its stake in the company, Spitzer, Frank Partnoy from the San Diego University School of Law and William Black of the University of Missouri in Kansas City said in an op-ed piece published in Sunday's New York Times. AIG's internal accounting documents and financial models should be put on the Internet to let regulators, journalists and taxpayers "piece together" details of the collapse, they said.

'Why haven't the Treasury and the Federal Reserve already made sure the public could see this information?" they wrote. "Do they want to protect AIG, or do they worry about shining too much sunlight on their own performance leading up to and during the crisis?"

The Treasury Department has been in discussions to sell its 80 percent stake in AIG, after banks including Bank of America Corp. paid back the US bailout fund to avoid further oversight. Assistant Treasury Secretary Herb Allison told a House subcommittee December 17 the government is seeking to "monetise its investment" in the insurer.

AIG's "web of bad business judgments" should be further evaluated, and the large government stake should be used to force the company's board to release the information, wrote Spitzer, who resigned as New York governor in 2008 amid a prostitution scandal, and the two professors.

Andrew Williams, a spokesman for the US Treasury, declined to comment. Representatives of New York-based AIG didn't immediately return a message seeking comment.

"The longer it remains hidden, the less likely we will be to answer many questions about the AIG collapse and the larger economic crisis — including the most important one: how do we prevent a repeat?" the three men wrote.

They called on the three trustees of the AIG Credit Facility Trust, who oversee the US stake, to ask the insurer's directors to post the e-mails and other documents. "The board will have no choice but to comply," they wrote.

The US, forced to step in 14 months ago to stave off a collapse of the financial system, is AIG's biggest shareholder "reluctantly and out of necessity," said Allison, who oversees the Troubled Asset Relief Programme. "We will exit these investments and return TARP funds to the Treasury as soon as is practicable."