The Focus Insurance Company Ltd. has finally been dissolved, more than 17 years after the liquidation process began.

The Bermuda Supreme Court announced in an order dated May 22 that liquidators PricewaterhouseCoopers had been released and that the company was dissolved.

The epic saga of court battles and failed companies centred on British chartered accountant Mark Hardy, who was the chairman of Focus.

Focus hit the headlines in the early 1990s when the company went into liquidation along with Forum Reinsurance, its parent company, both ventures set up by Mr. Hardy. The battle to close the business down saw a warrant for Mr. Hardy's arrest issued in Bermuda and assets frozen in the UK in connection with Mr. Hardy and another associated business.

A default judgment for $20 million was issued and contested by Mr. Hardy.

Forum Reinsurance was started in July 1985 and set up Focus, which was formerly known as Trenwick Reinsurance Co Ltd., after Trenwick was acquired in 1987.

The Focus liquidation process began in October 1990 as a voluntary measure by the shareholders of a solvent company, but was placed under the protection of the Supreme Court in December of that year. This was after the chief justice considered a petition from a Focus creditor, Mutual Fire, Marine and Inland Insurance of Pennsylvania.

In January 1991 a Bermuda court-appointed Focus liquidator, David Lines, alleged in an affidavit filed in Bermuda Supreme Court that "a very substantial proportion" of Focus assets were transferred to an unlicensed Turks & Caicos reinsurer owned by Mr. Hardy the same day that Focus placed itself into voluntary liquidation.

In February 1991, a London High Court judge served an order on the UK home of Hardy and on a company called Aneco, whose parent company was also Forum Re, in response to worried creditors. Aneco, set up in 1982 to provide reinsurance programmes for captives and bought in 1988 by Mr. Hardy, was Bermuda's leading captive reinsurer until it stopped underwriting in September 1990.

This injunction froze up to $430,000 in assets of the Bermuda-based Aneco. The Cayman captive behind the action, American Professional Assurance Ltd, argued that since Mr. Hardy, Forum's chairman, lived in Sudbury Suffolk in England, and since he controlled Aneco, Aneco's central management was effectively located wherever Mr. Hardy was, regardless of management work carried out in Bermuda.

In 1993 Bermuda Supreme Court judgment in default against him was issued for $20 million. The case dragged on with writ and counter-writs filed. A mareva injunction (a court order to freeze assets) against Mr. Hardy in Bermuda was discharged in February 1998 and his UK bankruptcy was discharged in July of the same year. By October 1998, the former insurance executive applied to the Bermuda Supreme Court to set aside a near $20-million default judgment against him surrounding the failure of the Focus Insurance group of companies.

In October 2002, liquidators PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) announced that a 70-percent pay-out would be made to Aneco creditors. The company was understood to have more than 200 creditors and total liabilities of more than $100 million.