October 2005/2

Fundraising total tops $3.5bn, with further moves imminent Although a fresh wave of (re)insurance start-ups is not expected to wash onto the shores of Bermuda, the island has once again led the way in capital raising, as the industry responds to...

Aon UK has confirmed that it is to lose up to 750 jobs in a major restructuring of its Risk Services and Specialty divisions. As revealed by Insider Week on 26 September, the broker is to place its employees into “consultation” which is expected to...

MMC’s London based wholesale arm Price Forbes is in advanced management buy-out talks, The Insurance Insider can reveal. The move follows New York attorney general Eliot Spitzer’s investigations into the industry which have led to MMC’s rivals Aon...

The City of London police are conducting an investigation into allegations of fraud at Lloyd’s broker Besso Ltd after the company discovered irregularities in some client funds’ accounts, The Insurance Insider can reveal.

In our regular monthly International News Digest, we round up key stories from the last month, presenting them to you in easily digestable snippets.

Lloyd’s members’ agency CBS Private Capital has decided to restructure its new investment fund Insurance Capital Partners (ICP) after failing to excite sufficient investor interest. Launched with much fanfair this summer, Insurance Capital Partners...

With a general consensus that the impact of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita on the (re)insurance sector will be “market-changing”, industry observers are beginning to comment on just how the underwriting cycle and rating environment might change.

Following the news that the first Hurricane Katrina lawsuit had been filed against insurers in the US (see Insider Week No. 191), law firms have begun to brief insurance clients in earnest over the challenges they will face in the likely deluge of...

Shares in Bermudian insurer have dropped alarmingly by over 30 percent this month in the wake of substantial Katrina losses and poor results from the first-half of 2005. At the beginning of September shares in Goshawk were trading at over 36p on...

As the industry begins to question the reliability of catastrophe loss modellers in the wake of Hurricane Katrina’s devastation, there is still great variation on the estimates of the losses.

The Property Claim Services unit of the Insurance Services Office has released its estimate of insured losses incurred as a result of Hurricane Katrina at approximately $34.4bn, making it the most expensive catastrophe ever for US property/casualty...

Despite warnings that Hurricane Katrina could trigger CAT bonds it seems likely that most will be unaffected. It seemed that a number of CAT bonds were under threat as Katrina made its way across the Gulf of Mexico (GOM) as a Category Five storm.