NEW YORK (Reuters) - American International Group Inc chief executive Robert Benmosche has a hard-earned reputation as a fighter, so his decision to keep on working while battling cancer will come as little surprise.AIG said Benmosche will remain as chief executive despite the cancer he has been in treatment for since October. Benmosche said in a statement he expected to work another 12 to 18 months before retiring.AIG said on October 26 its CEO had cancer and was undergoing “aggressive chemotherapy”. It said on Monday he had responded “very well” to his treatment.Benmosche, who had said he planned to retire sometime in 2012, took over as CEO in August 2009, as AIG was struggling to sell assets to repay the US government after receiving a $182.3 billion taxpayer-funded bailout package during the crisis.Soon after taking over the fourth person to hold the top AIG job since June 2008 Benmosche reversed course on strategy.He stopped sales of assets that were drawing fire sale prices, tried to boost employee morale, and took on AIG’s critics including government officials.Just days after taking office, during a closed-door staff meeting in Houston, Benmosche said then-New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo “doesn’t deserve to be in government” and had acted like a “criminal”.He later said he regretted those comments, which were meant to bolster a demoralised AIG work force. His gambit appears to have worked; AIG employees and outsiders connected to the company often well up with tears when discussing Benmosche and his illness.Brooklyn-born Benmosche, a former CEO of MetLife Inc , prides himself on a reputation for toughness.He has said he developed a scrappy, can-do approach after his father died young, leaving his mother to pay off a large debt on a family hotel in a resort town in the Catskill Mountains of New York state.“I was outspoken when I first got there (AIG) and people wanted to know what kind of leader I will be,” he told Reuters in an interview just days after the Houston meeting last year.Since then, Benmosche has led a surprising turnaround for AIG, bringing the insurer to a point where the government has an accelerated path out of its investment in the company.AIG reached deals for several large ticket divestitures, including selling $17.9 billion of shares in an IPO of its Asian life business AIA and a $15.5 billion sale of another foreign life unit, American Life Insurance Co to MetLife.It has also mostly wound down Financial Products, the unit that was behind its near-collapse in September 2008.Benmosche, who has a head of silver hair and an imposing presence, displayed no signs of serious illness during interviews at AIG’s downtown Manhattan offices last year, both before and after his diagnosis.Only a few days after taking over as the CEO, Benmosche left for a holiday to oversee the harvest of his vineyards from his villa in Dubrovnik, Croatia.The villa, with terraces that stretched across 160 or 170 feet of sea front, has 12 bathrooms.He bought the stone house (then a “complete wreck” in his words) in 2001 for about $1 million, and has since spent several times that amount in rebuilding the house and gardens.“My children worry about how do they reach my level,” he said during that interview in 2009 in Croatia. “I suspect my son has a better chance because he is in real estate. My daughter is going to be a rabbi, so as a rabbi I don’t think she will ever make the kind of money CEOs make. But they were worried about how do they afford this.”“So everything I’m doing, whether it is in New York or here, you will see, provides income. I want to make sure the estate I leave behind not only provides value but is a viable business.”