American International Group chief executive officer Edward Liddy's phone is likely to be ringing off the hook with offers from insurance companies around the world looking to buy off pieces of the global giant's empire.

Among those callers will be CEOs of Bermuda companies, who will be busily evaluating some of the hundreds of companies owned by AIG as strategic acquisitions, according to industry expert Andrew Barile.

AIG was rescued from collapse with an $85 billion loan from the US Government last month after some $25 billion of write-downs related to the US housing slump and consequent downgrades by rating agencies.

Most of the problems came about through its portfolio of credit-default swaps, which offer insurance protection to debt investors, and its investments linked to US mortgages.

Now AIG faces the task of selling off enough pieces of its global empire to raise the funds to pay back the loan. Last Friday in a conference call, Mr. Liddy said AIG would look to preserve its core property and casualty operations amid the sell-off of life insurance and other assets.

Mr. Barile, a US-based insurance consultant and strategic adviser, who has four decades of experience in insurance, offered the views of an independent industry insider on AIG's situation.

"This of huge importance for the industry, in that this is the biggest insurance company in the world with pages of insurance operating bodies in all the countries of the world," said Mr. Barile, president and CEO of Andrew Barile Consulting Corporation, Inc."

AIG is the biggest buyer of reinsurance in the world, so the Bermuda reinsurers will be very familiar with its structure. For example, you may get a CEO of a Bermuda company who sees the Illinois Union Insurance Company in Chicago as a good strategic buy to expand into the US in surplus lines.

"The people who have the wherewithal will be calling Liddy and making offers for their strategic acquisition targets. As a seller, Liddy knows that time is running against him. There is no time for them to sit there and figure out what to sell."

Within two weeks of the federal loan, AIG has already drawn $61 billion on that credit line, Bloomberg reported. Annual interest payments on the public-sector cash are estimated to be between $8 billion and $10 billion.

But aggressive competition was also piling on the pressure for AIG to sell assets quickly, Mr. Barile added. "Many of the big insurers are trying to use this chaotic scenario, in a soft market, to take AIG's clients away," he said. "If they lose clients, they will lose value."He noted that Ace Ltd., the Switzerland-based insurance giant with principal executive offices in Bermuda, had taken out a full-page colour advertisement in The Wall Street Journal last week.

"The ad said nothing about AIG, it was all about Ace," Mr. Barile said. "But Ace knows that all the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies read the Journal, and they will be looking to win business from AIG."

Meanwhile, brokers like Marsh and Aon will be frantically trying to work out which captive insurance entities are fronted by AIG companies, and what that means for them, Mr. Barile said."A lot of people in the industry at many companies have been working 12-15 hours a day and coming in at weekends to work on this," Mr. Barile said. "There is a sense of urgency that is not coming across in the commentary we are seeing on the AIG scenario."