Two more European insurers have been added to the list of companies the US SEC and the New York Attorney General want to speak to in their far reaching investigation into irregularities in the insurance industry.
As part of an investigation into US bond issuer MBIA, Munich Re, the largest reinsurer in the world, and Converium have been issued with subpoenas by New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
The two companies’ confirmation of the approaches from the US authorities comes two weeks after French insurer Axa received requests for information from across the Atlantic. The developments will come as a disappointment for the German and Swiss companies, which may have thought that they had escaped US investigators’ scrutiny when they were not contacted at the same time as Axa.
The three European companies are being questioned due to the fact that they were MBIA’s reinsurers in 1998 at the time of the collapse of Allegheny Health, Education and Research Foundation, which MBIA insured. The US authorities are looking into whether matters surrounding the Allegheny Health bankruptcy were improperly accounted for. Munich Re and Converium said they would cooperate with the investigation.