January 2004/1

The insurance business appears quite good these days. Premiums have gone up sharply for several years. Reasonably well-capitalized property-casualty companies have to do something very wrong to achieve poor accident-year results. You'd probably call this

Insurance analysts are taking mixed positions on the industry’s fortunes with Europeans seemingly less confident on prospects, The Insurance Insider discovers 2004 is likely to be marked by premium growth in the high single digits, with a continuing bu

It’s not just analysts who made their predictions for 2004 – brokers also took a view on business conditions over the next 12 months. For Aon, the New Year was about resolutions – and to back up the message it published a "to-do" list for the insurance

Japanese backer Sompo establishes fraud at controversial US aviation reinsurance The three Japanese insurers who discovered they owed more than $3bn after backing a North Carolina managing agency won a significant victory in the United States last mo

Italian firm goes into meltdown; limited D&O cover available The ongoing investigation into the Parmalat accounting scandal has raised questions about insurers' exposures to the collapsed Italian long-life milk, juices and biscuits conglomerate. In

Another loss struck year for the troubled space insurance sector was rounded off in farcical fashion with the revelation that a Loral-built SPAINSAT satellite was “dropped” during testing, leading to a potential $95mn claim on the London cargo market.

New Bermudian based (re) insurance group Quanta Capital is set to raise over $600mn in an initial public offering, despite being in existence for only matter of months. On the 24 December 2003, Quanta filed a Form S-1 registration with the US Securiti

Bermudian casualty insurer XL Capital Ltd revealed a higher than expected $647mn post-tax charge for Q3 2003. In a press release the company said the charge, which followed a claims audit and year-end reserve review, was "primarily related to adverse deve

US giant property casualty insurer The Hartford announced on 19 December that it had agreed a $1.15bn global claims settlement for asbestos exposures to MacArthur Company and its Western MacArthur subsidiary. In a statement, the insurer said the agreem

Swiss Re's decision to stop writing a significant amount of Lloyd's reinsurance business is unrelated to the Central Fund coverage dispute, the Zurich headquartered reinsurer said last month. As revealed in the December edition of Insider Week's siste

The parent of disgraced broker Stirling Cooke Brown has applied for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection while revealing that its largest creditor is London law firm Richards Butler. Richards Butler advised Stirling Cooke Brown in the marathon legal battle

Over 2000 policies have been issued from dubious insurer, despite warnings from The Insurance Insider last year, principally for employers’ liability. The UK regulator, the Financial Services Authority, (FSA) has warned the industry about CIC - the dub