August 2013/2

The Insurance Insider tracks all the notable P&C sector share prices of the last week and compares year-to-date performances

Enstar had expanded its total assets from $5.9bn at the end of 2012 to $7.9bn at the mid-year due to its acquisitions over the past year, excluding the latest two deals with Torus and Atrium.

The market has priced in expectations of an escalating bidding war between Fairfax Financial and Bermudian legacy buyer Catalina for American Safety Insurance (ASI).

The Indian government included a long-awaited insurance bill as one of the priorities in its legislative programme when the country's parliament opened on 5 August.

Follow-form broker facilities could create a conflict of interest if underwriters are offered average pricing as part of a verticalised placement, rather than the lowest price received by any market writing a line, RPC partner Steven Francis told The Insurance Insider.

The UK commercial court has ruled that a group of reinsurers do not have to pay a 450mn Philippine peso ($10mn) claim stemming from a passenger ferry that capsized in a typhoon off the Philippine coast in 2008, killing 819 people.

Californian residents can now file class action suits against insurers for "unfair" advertising in certain circumstances, the Californian Supreme Court ruled on 1 August.

A New York federal court has given the go-ahead to Greenlight Reinsurance's $42mn breach of contract suit against the US managing general agency Appalachian and its Bermudian affiliate over a series of reinsurance contracts.

A California district court has rejected FM Global's attempt to reduce a disputed $387mn claim filed by defence contractor Northrop Grumman after Hurricane Katrina.

English law has long been regarded as a more insurer-friendly jurisdiction than many others, but a judge recently gave leave to appeal his decision to support underwriters' rejection of a claim because he thought the outcome unfair.

Rated reinsurers were the strongest competitors for Florida working-layer risk this year despite an increased capital markets presence, RenaissanceRe said on an earnings call.

The cat bond market showed pricing leadership in the first half of the year rather than detaching from traditional market rates, Goldman Sachs' ILS team argued.