The mega-merger between Axis and PartnerRe is set to go ahead without an outside bidder disrupting the deal, an industry chief said yesterday.

Validus CEO Ed Noonan — who successfully launched a hostile takeover of IPC Holdings after it had agreed a deal with Max Capital — told The Insurance Insider the industry had little appetite for the tactic.

Mr Noonan said: “It makes for great talk — I just don’t know how many insurance executives that have the stomach for it. It doesn’t win you any popularity contests.

“There aren’t many insurance executives who are willing to run the risk of putting their own company in play.”

Mr Noonan in 2012 went after Transatlantic Re after it announced a merger with Allied World.

Transatlantic Re was later acquired by US insurance firm Alleghany for $3.4 billion after Validus swooped with a higher bid, which led to shareholders voting to dump the Allied World deal.

Mr Noonan said that hostile takeover bids inevitably meant that the aggressor’s share price is “trashed” — partly due to fears that a major dilution would be caused by the issuing of shares and that multiple bids would have to be made to persuade the target board to give in.

And he stressed that Validus would probably not look to chase a deal with either Axis or PartnerRe.

Mr Noonan said: “We don’t find either company to be a natural fit. All their profits have come from reinsurance — we’ve got that.

“If we wanted to write more reinsurance in this market we could do so — we’re opting not to do that.”

Mr Noonan added that news of proposed mega-mergers like Axis and PartnerRe and XL and Catlin announced in recent months had left Validus unmoved.

He said: “It could be maybe you have to have $10 billion of capital for anybody to put you on an approved list, but we haven’t had any problems so far and I’m not really anticipating them.”

Mr Noonan added that — in the current climate — it was “a lot easier” to turn a profit as a $4 billion company than as a $10 billion one.

But he said: “We are happy to answer the phone and listen to any idea that will bring our shareholders value, but we don’t see this as a natural time to be out looking.

“We like our business model a lot and we are content to execute on our current strategy.”

Validus signalled that its $690 million takeover last year of US-based insurer Western World last year would mean a focus on specialty insurance.

Mr Noonan said: “We’re a bigger insurer than reinsurer and we’re going to grow in the insurance business.

“When the reinsurance market comes back we’ll write every penny of well-priced business we can find.”

Validus Re wrote $1.4 billion of business in 2014, while its Lloyd’s insurance platform Talbot wrote $1.1 billion, while it estimated last June that its takeover of Western World would lead to another $310 million of premiums in 2014.

Figures announced last week showed that Validus had a 13.2 per cent operating return on equity. As of January 1 this year, the firm reported that its reinsurance arm had written $440 million in premiums — down more than ten per cent on the same time in 2014.