The insurance giant has been laboring under charges of false accounting, bid-rigging and missed payments to state workers compensation schemes but now the New York Times reports that the company has all but reached a comprehensive settlement with regulators.

Contingent commissions are expected to survive the settlement but require more disclosure. Hmm. How about disclosing that agents will steer clients to companies that pay instead of those that don’t. This certainly needs to be fixed.

A spokesman for former AIG head honcho Maurice Greenberg says the settlement is all political and blames New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer. “Even if all the allegations were to be believed,” he tells the paper, “a settlement of this magnitude is merely a political trophy for the attorney general and totally disproportionate to the impact of the alleged misconduct.”

Spitzer’s investigations came in over the top of SEC investigations into policies sold to companies that used accounting loopholes to hide losses. AIG was a major beneficiary of these tricks when it bought a policy from General Re that allowed it to bolster reserves by $500 million with “finite insurance.”

Greenberg, who initiated the deal, has had his lawyers say that such “finite insurance is a murky area where risk parameters are not well defined.” Figure it out guys.