NEW YORK (AP) — Former American International Group Inc. CEO Maurice (Hank) Greenberg returned to the witness stand yesterday to defend taking over a retirement bonus fund that AIG is trying to recover in federal court.

AIG's lawyer Theodore Wells played a video of Greenberg in 2000 telling retirement plan participants that there were "sufficient shares in the trust for a couple hundred of years".

"It's a motivating speech," Greenberg told jurors. He said the participants in attendance would have known that "a couple hundred years is an exaggeration, obviously".

Greenberg has appeared mostly solemn and composed during Wells' examination, but he raised his voice when Wells pressed the issue again: "It was a figure of speech," Greenberg said, leaning forward in his chair.

Insurance giant AIG has accused Greenberg, through his firm Starr International, of raiding an AIG retirement programme composed of $4.3 billion in stock after he was ousted from the CEO position in 2005.

Greenberg, 84, built AIG over nearly four decades from a small insurer into the world's largest, and was then kicked out as CEO amid investigations of accounting irregularities.

Starr, however, remained AIG's largest shareholder until the government bailed out AIG last year.

AIG has received $182 billion in federal aid. AIG says if it can reclaim the $4.3 billion from Starr, the money would help the troubled financial services company repay the government. The complicated lawsuit against Greenberg and Starr involves a fund created during a reorganisation of AIG in 1970 with $110 million worth of stock. Its value grew to $4.3 billion over nearly four decades.

The fund has been described in letters and speeches by Greenberg over the years as a retirement bonus fund for select current and future employees — a "kind of golden handcuffs" given to members of "the inner club."

Starr International Co., also known as SICO, is a Bermuda-based holding company.

The fund was "a plan. A plan is not cast in concrete. There had to be certain performance standards," Greenberg said on Tuesday. If those standards were not met, Starr's voting shareholders "had a right to make a change," he said.

He also said the fund was "not just for AIG employees," and that it had many other purposes. One was to allow Starr to control AIG, Greenberg said, and after Greenberg lost his job, Starr's voting shareholders "lost control" of AIG, and were then able to reclaim the shares.

AIG's lawyer Wells said on Monday that Greenberg took control of the fund and then sold tens of millions of the AIG shares held in it because he was "angry" about losing his job.