Robert Benmosche the AIG chief executive officer who is battling cancer believes that one of the most challenging roles in global business may actually be good for his health.So much so, that the man who came out of retirement two years ago to lead the New York-based insurance giant from its bailout quagmire, has told his company directors that he is open to remaining in the CEO’s role for a longer-than-expected stint into 2013.“I’ve told the board that if my health holds up, I’ll stay through 2012,” Mr Benmosche told The Royal Gazette in an exclusive interview yesterday.“But if they want me to stay on, I’ve decided that retiring, with my health issues, is not the best and that I’d like to stay active a little bit. So I said that in 2012, if the board would like me to stay on until 2013, and my health says I’m able to do that, then I’d consider doing that.“I’m enjoying it, because we’re at a point now where we’re actually successful. I get a lot of energy from the people in this company and their feelings of success and their appreciation for all of us working together. That’s part of the psychology of staying strong.”Mr Benmosche was in Bermuda yesterday to deliver a keynote speech at the Bermuda Captive Conference at the Fairmont Southampton hotel.He said the company, which was the beneficiary of a US Government bailout totalling $182 billion in funds borrowed and made available, had evolved through his tenure into an entity that was a “smaller, much more transparent, capital-conscious company”.Since AIG’s near-death experience in 2008, the company has sold off 27 businesses generating enough cash to pay off borrowings from the Federal Reserve two years earlier than expected.The US Government still owns about 77 percent of AIG, after having sold off 200 million shares last month at a small profit.“The focus is now almost exclusively on insurance,” Mr Benmosche said. “We still have aircraft leasing, which is not insurance-based, but almost everything else is.“We deleveraged the company and have derisked the company in terms of some of the financial products we do. We’ve sold off some of our life insurance businesses, but we still have a strong life insurance business in both the US and Japan.”So how long before the US Treasury recoups the remaining $40-plus billion that it is owed? The CEO did not give a target date, but said much depended on AIG’s financial results.“It depends on our performance,” he said. “If you look at 2010, we had a lot of special events but we saw the core insurance companies continuing to produce. If we continue to perform well and execute our plans my hope is that we’ll get more confidence in the investor community.“The more confidence that investors have in our future the better it will be to sell the remaining stock. People just want to see clarity that we’re a growing company again and that we are as intact as I said we are.”During his keynote address, Mr Benmosche talked about the strength of AIG through its size and diversified nature. Chartis, which makes up about 41 percent of AIG and is the group’s property and casualty insurance arm, he said, “might find it difficult as a stand-alone company”.When it was put to him that many of Bermuda’s re/insurers are like smaller versions of Chartis and are stand-alone companies, Mr Benmosche said: “Small, stand-alone companies are not the same as AIG. We’re huge. We have a huge legacy book of business.“So it’s not a question of ‘do you have business that you’re in that’s short-tail and renewable?’ So when we look at the size of our legacy and the size of the markets we need to grow into, that creates the question of ‘what are the risks that something could go wrong and what could be catastrophic?’“Then you look at our $68 billion in reserves and people say we added a lot, but it was only six percent. If any other company had to put $4.3 billion in their reserves, then that’s a huge amount of money not for AIG.“My sense is that the bigger you get and the more concentrated you get in some of these areas, the more concern you have of things going wrong. That’s why you need diversification, in my opinion.”Last month Peter Hancock replaced Kristian Moor as CEO of Chartis, soon after the company took a $4 billion charge in the fourth quarter of last year in order to bolster reserves.Like many of its Bermuda rivals, AIG suffered large catastrophe losses in a first-quarter marked by flooding in Australia and earthquakes in New Zealand and Japan. The losses have not helped AIG to restore the confidence of investors concerned by the need to bulk up reserves. But the impact of natural disasters estimated to have cost the insurance industry more than $50 billion was already being felt in the market, Mr Benmosche said.“You’ll see rates start to go up and we have seen a dramatic improvement in rates,” he said. “So we’re going to be able to charge more to recover some of the loss we’ve taken.“The first quarter was an unusual quarter by any measure, but we expect catastrophes during the year and our hope is that we’ll see more normalised cat experience. We have a slight reduction in profit, but I don’t see it as an insurmountable problem. We’ll suffer some short quarters but we’ll make it up as time goes on.”AIG has had a presence in Bermuda for almost seven decades and still employs around 200 people on the Island. Asked about the part Bermuda played in in the industry and for the company, Mr Benmosche said it had an evolving role.“You have a lot of history here, a lot of roots here, and a lot of people,” he said. “The point is for Bermuda to continue to be part of the global regulatory environment and continue to make sure they’re keeping pace with the rest of the world.“We, as a company, have got to work out how we leverage what’s here in terms of the businesses we have, the commitment to our people here that we already have.“If you think of the US, Hartford used to be the capital of insurance and it’s dissipated. Bermuda is a strong reinsurance market and strong in captives, and as long as it maintains that core competency and strength, I think Bermuda will continue to do well.”Mr Benmosche has received praise, from the US Treasury and others, for re-energising AIG’s employees, restructuring the company and restoring stability faster than had been envisioned. However, he believes it’s the employees who have re-energised him.“The plaudits are not mine, they’re everybody’s,” he said. “I’m absolutely shocked with the amount of success the people of AIG have had in the 22 months I’ve been here.“When you talk about long-service employees and staff who have stayed here and they’re all committed to getting this right, they’re way ahead of any expectation and I think it speaks well of the 65,000 people here.”