Bermuda-based Quanta Capital Holdings Ltd. has attracted strong investor interest over the past week resulting in a 10.5 percent rise in its share price.

The boost in the insurer and reinsurer's fortunes came about after the company announced on June 4 that it intended to buy back all of its series A preferred shares at a price of $20 per share — a 13.8 percent premium to the closing price on the previous trading day.

Quanta massively beat analysts' expectations when it swung to a $4.6 million profit in the first quarter of this year.

Its buy-back announcement on Monday last week helped to boost the share price. It started the week on $2.24 and closed Friday on $2.45. Yesterday the Quanta share price ended the day on $2.46, down six cents (2.3 percent).

Quanta's share price dipped 50 percent in the first week of March 2006 into the $2.35 range as it became clear the company was about to announce higher-than-expected fourth-quarter losses from 2005. And the stock has been struggling at or below that level ever since.

Quanta went into run-off last year — excluding its lines of business done through Lloyd's Syndicate 4000 — after the company's rating dropped below the 'A' range after a downgrading by AM Best.

That followed Quanta's announcement in January last year that it had understated its net losses related to a ruptured oil pipeline in California by $4.9 million.

The company was already dealing with around $50 million of losses from the 2004 hurricane season, followed by further heavy catastrophe losses in 2005.

This year, Quanta has been dealing with a class action lawsuit alleging that issued a series of false and misleading statements to the market between December 14, 2005 and March 2, 2006.

Those statements had artificially inflated the Bermuda insurer and reinsurer's stock price, claim the filings of a number of firms representing investors in a lawsuit filed with the US District Court in New York.