Quinn in Administration

cogito

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/8595018.stm

Saying 'I told you so' would give me no satisfaction. They've been stopped from writing business in the UK and the next step is likely to be that they will be prevented from renewing business before going into run off.

mattymoo

Ouch - that is going to hit construction big time. As well as Quinn Direct for motor, Quinn were pretty big players in the construction liability market. A lot of small to medium sized high risk contractors used them, despite their absence of a credit rating.

Looks like I could be pretty busy over the next few weeks.

cogito

If history repeats itself (as I'm sure it will), you can expect to see rate rises across the board and Quinn policyholders will end up seeing their own premiums double. It won't be good for the solicitors' PI market either as Quinn picked up quite a slug of that as well and it's a market that doesn't make money for insurers.

ses6jwg

My sister has her car insurance with these I think...

what will happen?

lisyloo

She's covered but will need to find a new insurer next time and it's going to be more expensive so she should start planning now.

Kittian_the_Blue

No surprise to this at all, it's a scandal that they have been allowed to continue to trade for this long - the Eire goverment wasn't able to save them this time....

moleymoo

More on this from the Irish times -

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2010/0330/breaking32.html

MM

cogito

“The appointment of joint provisional administrators will better protect policyholders. It will allow the firm to remain open for business, to continue to be run as a going concern under different management and to put the business on a sound commercial and financial footing.”

Sounds good in theory. The thing about insurance is that perception is everything. Insurers are selling a promise written on a piece of paper. Businesses buy insurance to transfer risk from themselves to the insurance company but there is not much point in doing that if you still end up holding the risk because the insurers are no longer around to keep their promise.

Businesses will simply find cover elsewhere even though it's likely to cost them more so the insurers' book will simply dwindle away. We've seen it before and I doubt that it will be any different this time.

mattymoo

moleymoo wrote: »

More on this from the Irish times -

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2010/0330/breaking32.html

MM

An interesting related article published yesterday.

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/finance/2010/0329/1224267276470.html?via=rel

Anglo Irish Bank (govt bail out) is owed billions by Quinn. They wanted to reduce their reliance on Quinn by swapping debt for equity. Sean Quinn refused - no doubt because gov't involvement would bring the house of cards crashing down.

Could be the start of a domino effect - hope not though.

PS: there will be quite a few in the insurance world celebrating today -
_party__party__party_:dance::dance::dance::rotfl::rotfl::rotfl::beer::beer:

Kittian_the_Blue

mattymoo wrote: »

An interesting related article published yesterday.

PS: there will be quite a few in the insurance world celebrating today -
_party__party__party_:dance::dance::dance::rotfl::rotfl::rotfl::beer::beer:

Not sure we will be celebrating, another independent will do everyone harm............

ses6jwg

so she is covered until the policy expiration date?

who would she go to with a claim etc?