While CEO Edward Liddy was in the congressional hot seat Wednesday, he mentioned that AIG insures oil rigs. If Norm Coleman was watching the House committee hearing from home, perhaps he turned to his wife and said, “Honey, that’s what you do!” Allegations of unreported monetary gifts — cloaked as payments from a Coleman contributor’s marine-exploration firm to the insurance company where Coleman’s wife works — remain alive (if dormant) in Texas and Delaware courts. Coleman still wants to use campaign cash to fight them.

Financial ties between Laurie Coleman’s employer, Hays Companies, and a Coleman benefactor’s marine-exploration company led to charges of money-funneling that exploded in two civil lawsuits filed outside Minnesota shortly before Election Day.

A postponement in a Texas case has forestalled for now any further detonations there, while a motion to dismiss could snuff out a suit in Delaware. But a Coleman aide says the former Republican senator still wants to use campaign money to defuse the charges.

The suits allege that the St. Paul insurance company received money meant for Coleman disguised as payments from a Texas firm — Deep Marine Technology — controlled by Coleman friend and benefactor Nasser Kazeminy.

Coleman denied the charge and in December — after news leaked of an FBI inquiry into the allegations — said he’d ask for permission to spend campaign funds on lawyers and investigators to disprove it. An aide announced Coleman’s intention to request an OK from Federal Election Commission: “We will be seeking the necessary approvals at the proper time to ensure that this is done in strict accordance with all appropriate laws and rules,” the campaign said.

“The proper time” was apparently not during the Senate recount or election contest trial, which adjourned last week. (The three-judge panel is now deliberating whether Democrat Al Franken should retain his slim lead over Coleman.) Nothing from Coleman has surfaced among the Federal Election Commission’s official list of pending advisory opinion requests.

But a Coleman request is, indeed, still in the works. Says Coleman staffer Tom Erickson, as reported by MinnPost: “We’ve been in contact with FEC and are in the process of providing them with all of the detailed information they need, and require, to adequately address our request.”

The FEC already has the question before them. In December Alliance for a Better Minnesota filed a complaint asking the FEC to rule on Coleman’s stated intent to write checks from his campaign fund to cover legal costs of fending off the civil lawsuits. The Alliance tells the Minnesota Independent that the FEC has taken no action on the complaint.

How will the FEC handle Coleman’s request for an advisory opinion in light of the Alliance’s complaint already pending? FEC spokeswoman Mary Brandenberger told MnIndy it’s likely the commission would respond to Coleman first, since by law the commission must answer a candidate’s request within 60 days. (She said FEC policy is not to comment on requests until they become official, so she couldn’t confirm Erickson’s version of what’s going on.)

For those implicated in the lawsuits, the legal costs could be high. Coleman hired Douglas Kelley, a Minneapolis-based defense attorney. Kelley’s job is to “work cooperatively with authorities when such an investigation is conducted, and to quickly expose these allegations for what they are, and to hold those who made these false allegations against the Senator accountable,” a Coleman aide said.

Meanwhile, Laurie Coleman; her employer, Jim Hays; and Kazeminy also hired attorneys — “four of Minnesota’s biggest legal guns,” as news reports called them. Laurie Coleman retained Earl Gray, and Hays hired Doug Peterson. Kazeminy chose Joe Friedberg, who soon joined Norm Coleman’s legal team for his election contest trial.

But while Friedberg and Coleman have been busy with the election aftermath, Kelley’s been handling in his court-appointed role as receiver for accused Ponzi-schemer Tom Petters‘ business empire.

In a separate ruling today, the FEC told the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee it could set up a fundraising account to help Franken cover election contest expenses. The commission had “no opinion,” however on whether the Franken campaign could do the same.

Republican groups can take the opinion as applying to them as well — a welcome development for the Coleman campaign, whose own fundraising took a hit after a database-leak scandal erupted last week.