August 2008/1

New York headquartered Tower Group is to buy CastlePoint Holdings, the Bermudian reinsurer it established in 2006 for $490mn.

Shares in Lloyd's (re)insurer Advent Capital have climbed a further 4 percent today (5 August) after the company rejected an overture from its largest shareholder, Fairfax Financial Holdings.

Swiss Re is to pay £753mn for the life assurance arm of Barclays, the group has confirmed.

For the second quarter in a row, analysts were upbeat on Lancashire Holdings Ltd, despite the Bermudian insurer booking a fall in profits hit by the "unusually large" number of Q2 industry losses.

Our monthly column keeping a check on recent US and EU legislative and regulatory developments, in association with Sidley Austin LLP

In line with plans to refocus its business on its core (re)insurance operations, XL Capital also signalled a shift in its investment strategy, which has proved costly in the current credit and financial markets turmoil.

Trading in Carvill's reinsurance catastrophe derivative contracts is now over $60mn in nominal value as the US hurricane season is sizing up to be the most potent since 2005.

Despite agreeing a deal with SCA and regulators to shed the majority of its $65.7bn pre-IPO notional exposures to the bond insurer, XL is still on the hook for potential liabilities under guarantees that were around $1.1bn in notional value at the end of

Asked about the gathering storm of sub-prime last year, Henry Keeling described the crisis as presenting an "attractive opportunity" for the Bermudian (re)insurer.

Mangrove Bay has become the first major contingent capital facility issued by a non-life (re)insurer to be called upon after the Bermudian (re)insurer confirmed last month that it would be exercised.

Florida is made up of 67 separate counties while Texas - where everything has to be big - consists of 254 individual counties.

An inevitable sign of the times is that insurers are seeing their revenues either flat or falling – a trend that featured heavily in AM Best’s table of top US property casualty writers.