October 2005/2

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...

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

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...

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 growing frequency of downgrade clauses could trigger a run on the bank if the rating agencies react with a slew of negative actions. The threat of a Post-Katrina liquidity crunch has grown as the rating agencies have become more aggressive...

Giant insurer American International Group (AIG) has upped the ante in its increasingly acrimonious dispute with former chief executive Maurice "Hank" Greenberg, by taking legal action in an effort to seize $20bn of its own shares from his control...

Despite the estimated £1.4bn ($2.5bn) blow from Hurricane Katrina, Lloyd’s still expects to make a full year profit in 2005. This was one of the messages from Lloyd’s first ever interim results published 5 October which show a profit of £1.38bn for...

But legacy of past errors weighs on project’s future Former Cox CEO Michael Dawson has made his presence felt as acting chairman of Kinnect almost immediately, releasing a missive to the market on 4 October in which he lays out a new vision for the...

Kiln Underwriting has confirmed that it will write no further wind-exposed Gulf of Mexico (GOM) risks for the remainder of the 2005 hurricane season. In an interview with The Insurance Insider, Charles Franks, active underwriter on Syndicate 510...

Energy losses as a result of Hurricane Rita are set to be much higher than initially expected according to industry experts. The storm, which at its peak reached category five, blew into the Gulf of Mexico (GOM) on 22-24 September, threading a path...

The former GoshawK chief executive Chris Fagan is set to acquire the run-off Bermudian reinsurer Overseas Partners Re Ltd (OP Re) with backing from Japanese private equity house Nikko Principal Investments Ltd.