Cover Up by 1,0000 Plus Redactions

American International Group Inc. submitted four rounds of regulatory filings in six months, with more than 1,000 redactions, as the Federal Reserve Bank of New York pressed the insurer to withhold data about bailout payments to banks, Bloomberg reports.

Both the SEC and the New York Fed were in on the cover up. Here's more from Bloomberg:

The insurer made an initial filing on Dec. 2, 2008, about Maiden Lane III, the taxpayer-funded vehicle that bought assets from AIG’s trading partners. After the Securities and Exchange Commission asked for more information, AIG amended December filings three times. The last set of amendments, in May 2009, included more than 400 redactions, and the SEC granted the company permission to withhold the omitted data until 2018.

According to e-mails released this month, AIG was asked to limit what the public knew about the Maiden Lane transactions. The payments have been called a “backdoor bailout” by lawmakers because banks, including Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Societe Generale SA, were reimbursed at 100 cents on the dollar for mortgage-linked securities that had declined in value.

AIG said in a draft of the Dec. 24 filing that it paid banks “100 percent of the par value” for securities tied to the swaps. The New York Fed crossed out the wording in the draft, Bloomberg News reported this month.

In place of that clear language. This was put in as an alternative:

ML III bought approximately $46.1 billion in par amount of Multi-Sector CDOs through a net payment to CDS counterparties of approximately $20.1 billion, and AIGFP terminated the related CDS with the same notional amount. The aggregate cost of the purchases and terminations was funded through approximately $15.1 billion of borrowings under the Senior Loan, the surrender by AIGFP of approximately $25.9 billion of collateral previously posted by AIGFP to CDS counterparties in respect of the terminated CDS and AIG’s equity investment in ML III of $5 billion.