The Wall Street Journal reports AIG Chief Executive Robert Benmosche threatened to walk last week. Chafing after the recent compensation review by pay czar Ken Feinberg, Benmosche reportedly told AIG directors he was “done,” but the board talked him down and he agreed to think it over.

Benmosche took over as the insurer’s chief executive in August, becoming the fourth person to hold the post in about a year. On his watch, the recipient of up to $180 billion of federal aid, including more than $80 billion in loans, posted its second straight quarterly profit last week.

A recovery in the value of AIG’s investments has helped improve the bottom line at the 80 percent state-owned insurer, and it may be that the next CEO, if Benmosche catches the revolving door on the fly, will be able to justify better pay on improving performance. AIG said at the end of October it was no longer looking to sell two Japanese units, AIG Edison Life Insurance and AIG Star Life insurance, because it now believes they will help improve its corporate value.

There is still the matter of all that money owed to the U.S. government. Consider it a long-term objective for any AIG CEO.

American International Group has agreed to sell it’s Taiwan life insurance unit for $2.15 billion, a key step in its effort to raise cash after a U.S. government bailout last year saved the company from collapse, Reuters reports.

CIT Group Inc is seeing little interest from bondholders in a debt exchange offer aimed at repairing its fragile balance sheet, making bankruptcy increasingly likely, sources familiar with the matter told Reuters.

The following other corporate finance-related stories were reported by media on Tuesday:

PC maker Dell Inc is eyeing more acquisitions as part of a turnaround plan and is developing merger expertise, Chief Executive Michael Dell told Bloomberg in an interview.

Bank of America Corp has agreed to hand over to investigators documents describing the legal advice it received related to its purchase of Merrill Lynch, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the situation.

Japan Airlines Corp plans to seek a 250 billion yen ($2.8 billion) debt waiver as part of a new turnaround plan, Kyodo news agency reported on Tuesday.

Occidental Petroleum is buying Citi’s commodities trading unit Phibro for roughly its net asset value. How much that is, exactly, is hard to tell. Occidental said its net investment in Phibro is expected to be about $250 million.

The bigger figure, of course, is the $100 million associated with star trader Andrew Hall. His pay package has been the subject of much hand-wringing at Citi and in Washington.

Phibro’s management team, headed by Hall, and its employees will remain with the unit after the sale, expected to close by year-end. Citigroup shares were fractionally lower in morning trading on the New York Stock Exchange, while Occidental shares were up about 1 percent.

The problem, as many pundits are pointing out, is that Phibro is a profitable business, and Citi needs funds to repay a $45 billion government bailout. Like so many asset sales put together by institutions on the government drip — AIG in particular — the golden eggs tend to sell better than the rotten ones.

Is pay Czar Kenneth Feinberg going to name and shame?

At a speech yesterday in Washington, Feinberg said he planned to disclose the pay for the top 25 employees at Wall Street firms within the next 30 days, according to a research note by Jaret Seiberg, of Concept Capital. Seiberg saw Feinberg’s talk.

But it is not clear if names would be redacted from that disclosure, with perhaps only titles and salaries revealed.

Feinberg is charged with examining pay packages at companies that received government bailout money, including Citigroup <C.N> and American International Group Inc. <AIG.N>

Feinberg yesterday also indicated that he would like his work as pay czar to have staying power, according to Seiberg’s note, but it would be up to other regulators to “ultimately decide how broadly” his policies apply.

Seiberg also noted that Feinberg “seemed very uncomfortable” about using his power to claw back compensation already paid. But he also sugested egregious examples may warrant recoupment.

With apologies to Harper’s Index, some collected statistics on the collapse of Lehman and the roller-coaster year that followed.

Add your own significant digits in the comments section.

***

Number of siblings who made up the original Lehman Brothers, founded as a dry-goods store in 1844:

3

Age of Bavarian immigrant Henry Lehman when he founded the business:

23

Percentage difference between the DNA of former Lehman CEO Dick “The Gorilla” Fuld and an actual gorilla:

1.6

Lehman assets listed in its record bankruptcy filing:

$639 billion

Assets listed in the second-largest U.S. corporate bankruptcy filing of Worldcom

$107 billion

Pounds of yellowcake uranium left on Lehman’s books from a commodity trade:

450,000

“Buy it now” price of Lehman Brothers humidor on eBay:

$62.99

Rank of Giants Stadium LLC in the list of Lehman claimants:

7

Number of Wall Street institutions compared to a “great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity”:

1

Size of actual vampire squid, in feet:

1

Estimated ratio of Goldman Sachs bankers to other bank representatives at emergency government meeting to save AIG:

3

Amount of money former Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain spent renovating his office:

$1.22 million

Amount of the renovation budget devoted to an antique “commode on legs”:

$35,115

Percentage of global wealth destroyed by the credit crisis, according to Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman in March, 2009:

45

Percentage losses for investors who bought Blackstone shares at $31 IPO price:

56.5

Number of knees that Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson got down on to beg House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to support the bailout bill:

1

Per capita U.S. bailout funds provided to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac:

$313.44

Per capita U.S. funds provided to AIG:

$228.97

Amount of bonuses received by 73 AIG executives in March, 2009:

$165 million

Number of bathrooms in AIG CEO Robert Benmosche’s Croatian villa, shown during a tour in which he railed against “lynch mobs with pitchforks” who protested the bonuses.

12

Robert Benmosche, the new CEO of AIG, tells us he regrets tough comments he made about New York’s attorney general, explaining that he was trying to bolster a demoralized AIG work force. “You can characterize me as a goon or you can characterize me as somebody who is attempting to deal with a complex issue of a very demoralized employee force and said those things to them in confidence to reassure them that they no longer have to be afraid that they are going to be attacked again,” Benmosche told Adam Tanner in an interview.

During a closed-door staff meeting in Houston, Texas, last month, Benmosche said New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo “doesn’t deserve to be in government” and had acted like a “criminal.” Cuomo’s office declined to comment on the matter.

Given the poisoned chalice the stewardship of AIG has been for his predecessors, Benmosche may be taking the only tack available. The former CEO of MetLife and native New Yorker, who prides himself on a reputation for toughness, did try to couch his comments somewhat, saying from his Croatian villa that “one should not assume that my aggressiveness is disrespect.”

While the New York AG or another, higher official might not call for his head, it’s hard to imagine such insults being tolerated for very long.

Sometimes it’s easy to sniff at $70 million, particularly when you have government loans of $80 billion to repay (while the total size of the AIG bailout was closer to $180 billion, much of that consists of toxic mortgage assets that are now owned by U.S. taxpayer). So news that AIG has agreed to sell its Hong Kong consumer finance and India-based IT services units for that amount may seem to be a paltry offer for discussion, even in the blogosphere.

It’s not as if the well is dry on the M&A front. Microsoft and Nokia are set to announce a tie-up of some sort - assumed to have to do with office apps on Nokia phones - and UBS is inking a deal to get it out of the tax-haven doghouse with U.S. authorities.

But spare a thought for poor AIG nonetheless. AIG Financial Products said this week it had completed the sale of its energy and infrastructure investment assets for net proceeds of about $1.9 billion - better than a 1 percent chunk of its total bill to U.S. taxpayers, but the division blamed for so much still has mountains of assets to unload. And it has stepped up plans to list its Asian insurance unit, American International Assurance, in Hong Kong after failing to find a buyer for a large stake in it earlier this year.

Nobody said dismantling Hank Greenberg’s empire would be easy or even a compelling thing to watch. But at its current rate of divestment, the only thing more mind-boggling than the amount of money it owes to taxpayers is the potential time it might take to raise that kind of money.

Wall Street banks and lawyers could collect nearly $1 billion in fees from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and American International Group to help manage and break apart the insurer, the Wall Street Journal said, citing its own analysis.

The following M&A related stories were reported by Reuters and other media on Thursday:

Jewelry retailer Finlay Enterprises filed for Chapter 11 protection and said it would sell its assets in an auction supervised by the bankruptcy court. The company listed assets and debt in the range of $500 million to $1 billion in its filing, Reuters reported.

Indian cellular firm Aircel, 74 percent owned by Malaysia’s Maxis, has shortlisted four firms including American Tower and Bharti Infratel to conduct due diligence as it looks to sell all or part of its tower operations, Reuters said.

China South City Holdings, an operator of a wholesale and logistics centre in Shenzhen, is expected to revive its Hong Kong listing plan next month, raising $500 million for expansion, the South China Morning Post said.

UK broadcaster ITV is set to sell social networking site Friends Reunited to DC Thomson, publisher of the Beano comic for 25 million pounds, the Financial Times said.

Despite the sluggish performance of the stock markets recently, there is no shortage of deals to report.

Some corporate finance stories in the newspapers include:

* AIG (AIG.N) has resumed talks to sell its American Life Insurance Co unit to MetLife Inc (MET.N) in a deal that could help the stricken insurer raise more than $15 billion, according to the Financial Times.

* Datang Telecom (600198.SS) is in talks to sell a 20 percent stake to China’s national pension fund worth as much as 3 billion yuan ($428.6 million), China Daily reported.

* CIT Group (CIT.N), the U.S. commercial lender struggling to finance its business, is pressing U.S. regulators to allow it to issue government-backed bonds to allay concerns over its financial health, the Financial Times said.

* Xstrata’s proposed 40 billion-pound merger with Anglo American has effectively collapsed after Anglo’s shareholders rejected the approach, The Times reported.

* Metalloinvest, the Russian iron and steel firm founded by tycoon Alisher Usmanov, has agreed a four- to five-year extension with some creditors on repayment of $2.2 billion in debt, Vedomosti business daily reported.

At AIG’s annual meeting, one upset shareholder pointed out how much PwC, the insurer’s independent auditor, had been paid over the past two years. 

AIG paid PwC a total of $131 million in audit and other fees in 2008 and $119.5 million in 2007. 

“I want to know what these fees were paid for,” shareholder Kenneth Steiner of Great Neck, New York said. “Why didn’t anybody know what was going on? What were the accountants doing? Were they sleeping?”

The fees look large but are not unheard of.  GE, for instance, paid KPMG $133 million in 2008 and $122.5 million in 2007.

Still, Microsoft paid its auditor, Deloitte & Touche, a fraction of that — only $27.9 million in 2008 and $23.5 million in 2007.

AIG CEO Edward Liddy defended PwC, saying the auditor had raised early concerns about controls at the division blamed for AIG’s near collapse — AIG Financial Products. 

“PricewaterhouseCoopers conducted itself well over the last couple of years,” Liddy said. “They put a material weakness on the company with respect to its controls around FP (AIG Financial Products).”