A federal judge expressed “concern” that the U.S. scared off American International Group Inc. from joining a lawsuit by Maurice “Hank” Greenberg, its former chairman, challenging the insurer’s 2008 federal bailout, Bloomberg News reported on Friday. “I had this lingering concern,” Judge Thomas Wheeler said today at a hearing in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims in Washington, D.C., on whether grant a request by AIG and the government to dismiss Greenberg’s lawsuit. Starr, Greenberg’s closely held investment firm and an AIG shareholder, sued the government for $25 billion in 2011, calling the assumption of 80 percent of the company’s stock by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in September 2008 a violation of the shareholders constitutional rights to due process and equal protection of the law. Starr also claims AIG’s board, which Greenberg said was unduly influenced by the government, failed to conduct a full and independent review of whether to join the lawsuit. Starr asked Judge Wheeler to find the board wrongly decided to stay out of the case. Wheeler declined to dismiss Starr’s complaint in July and reaffirmed his ruling in September. The hearing on Friday was on an amended complaint aimed mainly at the board’s actions on the lawsuit.
