Insurance Company, is being wound up and joint liquidators have been appointed.

Malcolm Butterfield of KPMG Peat Marwick (Bermuda) and Peter Beirne of KPMG Peat Marwick (UK) have been appointed joint liquidators of Anglo American Insurance Co. (Bermuda) Ltd.

The UK insurer had been bought by Bermuda-based Centre Re, whose president and CEO, David Brown, said: "Anglo is in a scheme (of arrangement) in the UK. The Bermuda company is a small affiliate, which was solvent. It had money in it and just to tidy things up, it is being liquidated.

"Centre Re was a very big reinsurer of Anglo-American in the UK. Its capital base declined and it was effectively requested by the DTI (Department of Trade & Industry) to stop writing business. It did and then went into run-off.

"We had a very big vested interest in making sure that the claims were settled professionally and the company managed the run-off.

"In order to do that we had to gain control of the company and we effectively bought the company at the value that it was then worth to take over the run-off.

"And subsequently, unfortunately, the reserves turned out to be worse than was thought at the time and obviously the company ended up being placed into a scheme of arrangement.

"But the original basis for buying it was so that we could control the run-off of the claims and make sure that they were professionally managed, because also we knew that the dollars being settled were the dollars we would have to pay out.'' Mr. Brown said: "The solvent Bermuda company is just one of the assets of the group with a bit of money in it. It was part of the group when we bought Anglo American. It was a company that had written a couple of reinsurance contracts that had been profitable and thus it had value.

"The liquidators are winding the company up to gather that value back into the main company's estate.'' Centre Re in 1994 bought Anglo American from controlling shareholder John Head & Partners L.P., which had acquired Anglo four years earlier for $117.1 million from a California savings & loan.

Just before the 1994 sale, insurance company investor, John Head, abandoned plans for a $100-million IPO for the company. At the time, Centre Re had provided aggregate excess-of-loss reinsurance on business Anglo wrote through the infamous and now-defunct H.S. Weavers Underwriting agencies slip line.

IRISC London Ltd., a specialist in insurance company run-offs, was engaged to handle Anglo's administration, including claims settlements.

Last March, Tony McMahon and Phil Wallace, partners in KPMG's corporate recovery practice, were appointed as provisional liquidators of the UK insurer, which wrote business in the London insurance market between 1987 and 1994.

David Brown