Insurance Corporation of Ireland

Document description

This case illustrates dramatically that even when a company appears to meet the solvency requirements satisfactorily, with a margin to spare, it may in fact be tumbling into insolvency. Far from the supervisor being able to recognise the situation, the company may not itself know what is happening. In this case there were warning signals from within the market, but no-one seems to have acted upon them. The London business was too immature and growing too rapidly for any realistic assessment of the true position to be made from the accounts or from the returns to the supervisory authorities. The rate of growth of business should perhaps have rung bells, as should the market gossip about ICIUOTEs underwriting policy, or lack of it.