WASHINGTON — The Justice Department on Thursday announced indictments of the former chief executive and two other former top executives of the Berkshire Hathaway subsidiary General Re for their roles in a 2000 reinsurance deal with American International Group (AIG).

The transaction was the same one that helped prompt the ouster last year of AIG's longtime chairman, Maurice Greenberg.

Former Gen Re chief Ronald Ferguson, former finance chief Elizabeth Monrad and former general counsel Robert Graham face charges of conspiracy to commit fraud, as will the former head of AIG's reinsurance operations, Christian Milton, according to the indictment unveiled Thursday at a news conference. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) also filed civil fraud charges against all four people.

Graham's attorney, Alan Vinegrad, reached Wednesday night when news of the indictment was first reported said he could not comment on the pending charges because he had not been informed of them by the Justice Department. But he said: "Rob Graham committed no crime. He is an attorney of the highest integrity who always acted in good faith and within the bounds of the law."

Monrad's attorney, Paul Schechtman, said he could not comment because he also had not been contacted by prosecutors. Ferguson's attorney, Douglas Koff, declined to comment, and Milton's attorney could not be reached.

Federal prosecutors generally give defendants in white-collar crime cases advance notice before announcing indictments, but that apparently did not happen this time.

Sources familiar with the proceedings said the federal grand jury in the Eastern District of Virginia had handed up the indictment very late in the day.

Prosecutors and the SEC have been investigating Gen Re's reinsurance deals for more than a year, and this particular transaction between Gen Re and AIG already has led to guilty pleas from two lower-level Gen Re employees, John Houldsworth and Richard Napier. AIG has also disavowed the deal as part of a major restatement last year.

According to court papers filed in the earlier cases as well as a civil fraud complaint filed by New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer against AIG and Greenberg, Ferguson and Greenberg agreed in the fall of 2000 to a complicated transaction that boosted AIG's reported loss reserves by $500 million at a time that some Wall Street analysts were expressing concern about the size of AIG's reserves.

Such deals are known as finite insurance or reinsurance because one company pays another to take on a specific, or finite, amount of risk for the other. They are not improper, as long as they involve a legitimate transfer of risk.

But prosecutors alleged in the earlier court papers that the transaction was a "sham," and that Ferguson, Monrad and Graham all knew that AIG was going to account improperly for the transaction.

Houldsworth admitted in court papers to creating false documents that made it appear that AIG was being paid $10 million to assume reinsurance risk.

In fact AIG was paying a Gen Re subsidiary $5 million and no risk was transferred, the court papers said.

After the AIG board learned about the transaction and that Greenberg had initiated the deal by calling Ferguson, they forced him to resign as chief executive.

Greenberg has not been charged criminally and has denied wrongdoing in Spitzer's civil fraud suit. His spokesman, Howard Opinsky, declined to comment on the latest developments.

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