THE CHAIRMAN and chief executive of US insurance giant, Liberty Mutual, met the Financial Regulator yesterday to discuss the company’s interest in buying the beleaguered Quinn Insurance.
Ted Kelly, who runs Liberty Mutual out of Boston, said the joint administrators of Quinn Insurance needed to move quickly to sell the business to retain value.
“The longer a company stays in administration, the more damaged the goods become,” he said.
“What we are concerned about is that the administration process is sufficiently protracted that what is there at the end is not going to be attractive to anybody.”
As reported last week by The Irish Times, Liberty – the fifth largest motor, home and general insurer in the US – is interested in buying the Cavan-based firm as a means of significantly expanding its operations in Europe.
“This would really begin to position us well in the retail market in the British Isles,” said Mr Kelly.
Liberty Mutual, which has annual revenues of $30 billion and 45,000 employees in 26 countries, has a track record of buying and turning around troubled insurers.
Mr Kelly said Liberty Mutual would leave Quinn Insurance intact if it proceeded with a takeover, as it has no competing businesses in Ireland or Britain.
This could limit job losses at the company to the 902 redundancies sought by the administrators from the 2,450-strong workforce. “It straddles Fermanagh and Cavan and there is not a lot of other stuff going on in Fermanagh or Cavan,” he said. “It is a pretty important employer,” he added.
Mr Kelly said that time was of the essence in the sale process.
“If they want to extract quality from that or if people want to save the jobs in Fermanagh and Cavan, they have got to get it back into proprietary hands quickly,” said Mr Kelly.
A spokeswoman for the regulator had no comment to make.
The regulator asked the High Court to put Quinn Insurance into administration last March after it discovered that eight subsidiaries had guaranteed €1.2 billion in debts owed by the Quinn Group, leaving the insurer technically insolvent.
Liberty is seeking to determine whether protecting jobs at the firm was among the criteria being considered in the sale process.
The joint administrators of Quinn Insurance, Michael McAteer and Paul McCann of accountants Grant Thornton, are compiling an information memorandum on the company to be circulated to 47 parties who have expressed an interest in the firm.
They plan to distribute the memorandum early next month and appoint advisers over the coming weeks to run the sale process.
Mr Kelly, who is originally from Co Armagh, said the Government’s decision this week to sell health insurer VHI had no bearing on Liberty’s interest in Quinn Insurance as he ruled out any purchase of Quinn Healthcare.
