New laws are being drafted to prevent banks in Canada from offering insurance products on their web sites. Canadian banks are already banned from selling insurance in their branches, a law which led some to open insurance offices "next door", but they had claimed that they were not breaking any rules by offering insurance on their web sites because a web site was not "a branch". Finance Minister Jim Flaherty said that he was drafting new rules to close this loophole. However, he hoped that banks would make the change voluntarily without it being necessary for the rules to be made more explicit.

Neil Barofsky, special inspector-general of the US Treasury's Troubled Asset Relief Programme (TARP), has launched two new investigations relating to the New York Federal Reserve's actions in late 2008, when it instructed AIG to pay credit default swap counterparties 100 cents on the dollar to retire $62.1bn in contracts. The first investigation will cover whether there was any misconduct relating to public disclosure — full details of the payments did not eventually emerge until March 2009 — while the second will look into the New York Fed's degree of co-operation with a previous audit conducted by Mr Barofsky's office. His announcement follows the release earlier this week of emails between the NY Fed and AIG which appear to show the Reserve putting pressure on AIG not to disclose full information on the payments.

US government-controlled insurer AIG has reached an agreement with chief executive Robert Benmosche that restricts his and other executives' use of corporate aircraft. The agreement was reached amid increasing scrutiny of AIG's expenditures in the wake of its federal rescue 16 months ago and settles a dispute between US regulators and Mr Benmosche, who assumed the CEO post last August. Under a Luxury Expenditure Policy that AIG adopted last month, Mr Benmosche's personal use of corporate aircraft must be "incidental to a business trip and the incremental cost is paid by the AIG CEO. Any other personal use of AIG aircraft is forbidden. In a federal filing yesterday, AIG said that Mr Benmosche must also cover in-flight food and beverages as well as lodging and ground expenses for the crew. The deal requires AIG to provide a minimum of $300m in aircraft liability insurance plus aircraft hull insurance.

French insurer AXA is to delist its American Depositary Shares from the New York Stock Exchange and to deregister from the US Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC). AXA noted that 95% of worldwide trading volume in AXA equity took place on Euronext Paris. AXA chairman of the management board Henri de Castries said that AXA had derived a number of benefits from its New York listing, initiated in 1996, but that "the market has not developed sufficient liquidity to be attractive for most institutional investors who continue to prefer the liquidity of our primary trading market on Euronext Paris". He added that "the burdens of maintaining our listing and registration seem disproportionate to the benefits we have derived". AXA's move follows the decisions of several market players to reduce the number of exchanges on which their stocks are traded, to save on listing and regulatory costs, as well as focusing trades in their most liquid markets. Netherlands-based Aegon announced last week that it would be quitting the Tokyo Exchange, while last November Canada's Fairfax decided to move back to just a Toronto listing. Last September Allianz announced a raft of delistings, including the NYSE.