Lloyd’s of London set for £231m hit from Sandy

Three of the Lloyd’s of London insurance market’s leading players owned up to a combined loss of about $375m (£231m) from superstorm Sandy and warned the final bill could change.

Bermuda-based insurer Catlin, operator of Lloyd’s biggest syndicate, is set to absorb about $200m in claims from Sandy, it said yesterday. Rivals Hiscox and Novae put their exposure at $145.79m and between $25m and $30m respectively.

Sandy, a 1,000-mile wide storm that killed 132 as it swept through the north-eastern United States on October 29, is expected to cost insurers up to $25bn, making it the second-costliest storm after hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

Insurers and analysts have said the size of the affected region, which includes New York and other densely populated and industrialised areas, makes the final damage bill difficult to calculate.

“This estimate is subject to a considerable degree of uncertainty due to the size of the storm system, and the wide variety of damage it caused,” Catlin said.

Sandy came at the end of a relatively uneventful year for natural catastrophes, in contrast with 2011, the insurance industry’s second-costliest on record after earthquakes in Japan and New Zealand generated a claims bill of over $100bn.

The comparative absence of big disaster claims during the first nine months of 2012 means the insurance industry is still expected to turn a profit for the year as a whole.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

“We expect Sandy will have turned what would have been a very benign catastrophe year and a very strong earnings year back into a relatively average one,” Joy Ferneyhough, an analyst at Espirito Santo bank in London, said.

Top US insurers AIG and Allstate have estimated their Sandy losses at $1.3bn and $1bn respectively, while Swiss Re, the world’s number two reinsurer, has said it expects to pay out $900m.

The Lloyd’s of London market, a collection of about 80 competing insurance syndicates that sell protection against natural catastrophe and other risks worldwide, has not yet said how much Sandy will cost it collectively.

Lloyd’s which traces its origins back 324 years to a London coffee house where merchants met to insure ships, has historically borne about 10 per cent of the claims burden from major natural disasters, analysts say.

Related topics: