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Tim Geithner, the Treasury secretary, on Friday faced fresh calls to appear before a congressional committee investigating the circumstances of $27.1bn in payments to AIG’s counterparties.

Some Democrats, including Edolphus Towns, the head of the House oversight committee, echoed the demands of Republicans for Mr Geithner to explain his role in the 2008 decision to pay off the insurance group’s credit derivative counterparties in full and try to keep details private.

According to the Treasury, Mr Geithner, then president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, recused himself from the case ahead of taking the top economic job in the new Obama administration.

That has not been enough to silence congressional critics whose denunciations of Mr Geithner, which reached a crescendo in November last year, had ebbed over Christmas.

If he testifies, Mr Geithner would face another run-in with a congressional committee two months after a testy hearing at which Kevin Brady, a Republican representative from Texas, told Mr Geithner to resign, provoking the Treasury secretary to accuse Mr Brady’s party of handing over “an economy falling off a cliff”.

The Treasury said on Friday: “Secretary Geithner played no role in these decisions and indeed, by November 24, he was recused from working on issues involving specific companies, including AIG.”

Mr Geithner’s name does not come up in e-mails obtained by Darrell Issa, the senior Republican on the House oversight committee, who has led an investigation into the payments to AIG counterparties such as Société Générale and Goldman Sachs.

The New York Fed emphasised on Friday that Mr Geithner had not been involved with discussions over how much information should be released to the Securities and Exchange Commission about the payments.

“Matters of AIG securities law disclosure were not brought to the attention of the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York,” said Thomas Baxter, the New York Fed’s general counsel. But Mr Issa is continuing to press for a full hearing, including an appearance from the Treasury secretary.

The Treasury declined to comment on whether Mr Geithner would attend a hearing into AIG, which Mr Towns wants to schedule for the week of January 18.

“I continue to believe that a comprehensive review of the rise and fall of AIG, and the involvement of counterparties, can provide a useful vehicle to understanding how inadequate regulations, cheap money, risky business deals, and in some instances, corruption led to the current economic crisis,” said Mr Towns.

The Fed has made no secret of its attempts to prevent the disclosure of the names of the banks who received payments. Officials at the central bank argued publicly last year that disclosure would hurt AIG’s future business and could destabilise the market.

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