Ace promotes Samers

Audrey M. Samers has been named global ethics & compliance officer for the Ace Group of Companies.

A statement said Ms Samers will be responsible for providing ethics and business practices guidance, educating the ACE organisation on that guidance, and maintaining a global monitoring function to evaluate compliance. Her mandate will also include communication and training for business ethics and compliance-related matters across the organisation.

She will report to Robert Cusumano, general counsel of Ace, on a day-to-day basis when she takes up the post on January 1.

Prior to her current appointment, Ms. Samers served as deputy global compliance officer and associate general counsel. She joined Ace in May from the New York State Insurance Department, where she had served as deputy superintendent and general counsel since June, 2001.

BF&M director named

A second former senior Sun Life of Canada executive has been made a director of BF&M Limited.

C.L.F. (Lee) Watchorn is President of the Watchorn Advisory Group, a company he established to provide advice to senior business leaders, primarily in financial services. He had a lengthy career with Sun Life Financial and for eight years was responsible for all of Sun Life's businesses in Canada. This included all of the insurance businesses.

Mr. Watchorn was also Chairman of Sun Life Trust, Spectrum Investments and McLean Budden Limited.

Earlier this week, BF&M said S. Caesar (Sy) Raboy, who was also a senior executive at Sun Life, had become a director.

Chairman elected

Partner Re chairman John Rollwagen has been elected chairman of SiCortex, a Linux cluster startup company.

Mr. Rollwagen, who served as chairman and CEO of HPC pioneer Cray Research from 1981 to 1993, is also an investor in the company.

"I had the good fortune to become involved with supercomputing and Seymour Cray at the beginning of an era of explosive growth for high performance computing," Mr. Rollwagen said. "Our company took a unique approach to supercomputing and ultimately became the leader of the industry. In SiCortex, I see a similar opportunity to work with an experienced technical and management team that is also taking a new approach to HPC at just the right time. In my opinion, this company represents the next generation of high performance computing."

In addition to PartnerRe, Mr. Rollwagen is a principal of Quatris Fund, an affiliate fund of St. Paul Venture Capital, formed to create, seed and mentor early-stage entrepreneurial ventures.