Did Cassano Shut Out AIG Risk Officers?

By Zachary Roth - March 27, 2009, 1:38PM

Did AIG's entire risk management team fall down on the job? Or, like the firm's auditors, were they prevented from doing it?

Yesterday we told you about Bob Lewis, AIG's chief risk officer, who still has his job despite a rather obvious failure to ensure that the firm wasn't taking on an unmanageable level of risk.

But it looks like it's not just Lewis. The Wall Street Journal reports that several longtime members of AIG's Credit Risk Committee are also still in place. That committee, says the paper, was in charge of overseeing those disastrous credit default swaps.

At least five of the committee's ten members have served for several years. In addition to Lewis, the chief risk officer, they are:

- Kevin McGinn, chief credit officer and chairman of the committee
- Win Neuger, chief executive of AIG Investments;
- William Dooley, head of AIG's financial-services division, which includes the financial-products unit that sold the credit-default swaps, and...
- Barbara-Ann Livanou, director of financial institutions in the credit-risk-management department.

Lewis and McGinn appear to be the most directly implicated here. It was Lewis' department, of course, that handled the company's "major risks," according to SEC filings looked at by the Journal. (A former AIG exec yesterday confirmed to TPMmuckraker that Lewis' role would have been to avoid letting AIG get into the exact position that brought it down.)