Companies: AGN    AV.    PRU   

The world’s insurance industry has been sizing up the different parts of American International Group (AIG), once the biggest general insurer in the world and now in intensive care after its disastrous flirtation with derivatives. Prudential, which has been eyeing up the AIG’s Asian assets for some time, caused much fluttering among the dovecotes when chief executive Mark Tucker let it be known that the Pru was looking ‘right across the board at the assets’.

This has stirred suggestions that Prudential’s US arm, which has some £620 million in its coffers, might be interested in AIG’s own US life business.

By contrast, Aviva, parent of the Norwich Union and Britain’s biggest insurance company, has declared it is not interested in what it describes as AIG’s ‘grossly overvalued assets’.

Across the North Sea, Dutch insurer Aegon took a £2.4 billion capital injection from the state after losing more than three quarters of its stock market value in a year.