for Premier Pamela Gordon and deliver opening remarks on Monday, as Bermuda hosts a three-day conference on captive insurance companies at the Hamilton Princess Hotel.

The conference will deal with the utilisation and operation of group-owned and rent-a-captives to cover workers' compensation, employee benefits, property & casualty, professional, product and general liabilities.

A key participant will be Registrar of Companies, Kymn Astwood, who will discuss the continued importance of the Bermuda market to today's worldwide reinsurance industry.

One discussion will be to update delegates on the new products being offered by the Island's commercial carriers, together with an analysis of the innovative insurance vehicles recently formed here.

Mr. Astwood is also expected to talk about regulatory tools designed to accommodate private sector innovation, Bermuda's role in the emerging market of securitization of insurance risks and plans to implement electronic commerce in the Bermuda insurance market.

KPMG Peat Marwick tax specialist in Bermuda, Jim W. Blankenship, will participate in a panel discussion on combining tax, regulatory and other legal considerations in structuring and operating a captive programme.

This session will isolate the IRS definition of insurance and will explain why that definition is important. Actual group captive case studies will be used to illustrate patterns for different groups in terms of when onshore or offshore, or both, is preferable.

Also explained will be the differences in structuring liability, property and workers' compensation group captives and the rent-a-captive alternative from a tax and legal perspective.

Meanwhile, Sedgwick Management Services (Bermuda) Ltd. senior vice president Peter J. Willitts, will lead a discussion on the evolution of captive structures, the challenges faced by the captive concept and what the future for captives are.

The conference materials highlight Bermuda as a domicile associated with the captive insurance market since the 1970s. Conference sponsor, International Business Communications (IBC), said buyers of commercial insurance and reinsurance coverages are increasingly accessing the Bermuda market that extends up to $500 million in excess liability insurance limits and over $150 million in property catastrophe reinsurance protection per programme.

At the start of 1996, about 1,400 of the total 3,600 worldwide captives were registered in Bermuda, making it the largest captive insurance centre in the world.

Other participants at the conference will include Mutual Risk Management chairman Robert Mulderig, who will moderate a panel discussing the rent-a-captive structure in an alternative market programme and how it is structured and what the benefits are.

Senior vice president of XL Re and XL Risk Solutions, Will Thornhill, will discuss the accessing of large capacity for pure captives and rent-a-captives, the various structures being utilised and special mechanisms for hard-to-insure risks.

More buyers are pursuing net capacity markets to reduce friction costs and to secure stable, long term reinsurance capacity.

BUSINESS BUC