Businesses standing in line for more than a decade to recoup monies from failed Aneco Reinsurance Underwriting Ltd. will this month get a final payout bringing total compensation to about 75 percent of what they were owed, the company?s liquidator said yesterday.

PricewaterhouseCoopers partner Peter Mitchell, who is the Bermuda liquidator in the Aneco matter, told the second dividend payment was a much smaller ?top up? payment, following a 70 percent payout to creditors in 2002. A legal notice announced the second and final dividend would be paid out this month to creditors who were part of a scheme of arrangement agreed several years ago to settle debts.

Creditors have been standing in line to have their debts paid since Aneco, which was at one time Bermuda?s leading captive reinsurer, stopped selling reinsurance in September, 1990 and was ordered wound up the following July.

Despite the shortfall between the total debt and what creditors were paid, with the payout being roughly 75 cents for each dollar of debt, it is likely creditors recouped more than they first expected.

The company was deemed ?hopelessly insolvent? by the Bermuda court as Aneco faced some 200 creditors with chits adding up to more than $100 million in debts. Creditors got a break in 2001 ? ten years after the company was put into liquidation ? in the form of a legal award for more than $51 million, after the House of Lords upheld a Court of Appeal decision that reinsurance broker Johnson and Higgins should pay all losses Aneco Re suffered under a failed reinsurance contract.