Your insurer goes bust – can you as an insured claim the reinsurance proceeds? An important decision in the NSW Supreme Court gives useful guidance on when a court will allow departures from the statutory scheme controlling the application of reinsurance proceeds (Amaca Pty Ltd v McGrath & Anor as liquidators of HIH Underwriting and Insurance (Australia) Pty Ltd [2011] NSWSC 90).

The insurer goes broke, and there are all these claimants at the door…

Key Points: The fact that you're a very big company doesn't mean you needn't follow the legal rules for the execution of documents.

Background

A large insurance company claimed to be a creditor of Ungul, a property developer. Ungul was in voluntary administration.

A meeting of Ungul's creditors was called for 11 June. The insurance company's solicitors contacted the administrator and said that:

A recent Full Court decision is a win for directors who hold D&O insurance policies, as well as those seeking to bring proceedings against directors of an insolvent company – probably to the dismay of insurers.

Date

6/22/2017

Action

Testimony of Keith Noreika, Acting Comptroller of the Currency, before the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs.

Key Provisions

The Comptroller made a series of recommendations for regulatory reforms directed at promoting economic growth and reducing regulatory burden. He stated that the OCC’s recommendations are consistent with the Treasury Report.

Key recommendations include:

Directors and officers (D&Os) of troubled companies should be highly sensitive to D&O insurance policies with Prior Act Exclusion. While policies with such exclusion may be cheaper, a recent decision by the U.S. Court of Appeal for the Eleventh Circuit raises the spectre that a court may hold a loss to have more than a coincidental causal connection with the officer’s conduct pre-policy period and make the (cheaper) coverage worthless.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit recently held that a Creditor Exclusion provision in D&O insurance coverage may result in significant limitations on the coverage provided to the D&Os, when the underlying dispute is with a creditor in its capacity as such.

The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois recently held that a title insurer may exclude coverage under the exception for defects “created, suffered, assumed, or agreed to by the insured claimant” without intentional or wrongful conduct by the insured. 

In so ruling, the Court also held that the Illinois statute for bad faith denial of coverage by insurers did not apply to title insurers.

The financial crisis has brought significant regulatory changes for credit institutions, many of them aimed at strengthening their capital requirements and creating safety buffers to absorb losses and recapitalise unsound and failing institutions.

The latest is an instrument known as senior non-preferred debt, which is midway between senior debt and subordinated/Tier 2 debt. This instrument will not qualify as Tier 1 or Tier 2 capital, but will be eligible to compute for purposes of TLAC/MREL requirements and will be cheaper for banks than pure subordinated debt.

La regla de la que vamos a tratar se formula con diversos nombres, aunque es muy conocida la expresión nemo potest propriam turpitudinem allegareo la denominación de denegatio actionis.

The defence of illegality, enunciated in arts. 1305 and 1306 of the Civil Code (abbrev.