New insurance kid on the block Quanta is making its mark in rapid time.

The company, which only incorporated as a Bermuda company six weeks ago, has already gone global in scale with an announcement that the company's New York offices were officially opened yesterday. The New York office joins Quanta's growing list of operations having already set up in Bermuda, the UK and Ireland.

Quanta - the only class four reinsurer, or multi-million dollar company to incorporate in Bermuda this year - was incorporated on August 15 and last month completed a private placement deal securing it some $505 million in capital. In a press statement issued yesterday, parent company Quanta Capital Holdings - a Bermuda-based company - said its US subsidiary, Quanta US Holdings Inc., was now open for business at its new offices in Rockefeller Plaza.

That company will reportedly manage Quanta's professional liability, environmental liability, surety, fidelity and crime, marine and aviation and structured products insurance lines.The company, which did not yesterday disclose how many staff it had in any of its offices, is understood to be running its Bermuda operations from temporary quarters at 44 Church Street. That address is the office of IAS Park, which was said to be providing management services on the accounting and administrative side, to Quanta.

Quanta confirmed that its principal executive offices were in Bermuda while its US headquarters would be its New York offices. The company may have gotten off to a rapid start but it has not necessarily been the smoothest, with a lawsuit launched last month against several of its newly hired employees by their former employer, CNA Financial Corp. The suit, which was brought in the US, is not against Quanta itself and legal counsel for the company staff have dismissed the action as being "without merit".

The company's rapid growth has been possible, at least in part, through several strategic acquisitions including its September purchase of Environmental Strategies Corporation, a full-service environmental engineering, remediation risk management and consulting firm. The ESC is the platform for Quanta's technical expertise in environmental insurance and will continue to provide risk evaluation services to its underwriters and to third parties.

Although relatively little is known about Quanta's management, the company did yesterday confirm that at least two of its senior executives would be based in Bermuda. Quanta CEO Tobey Russ is to be based here as well as David Whiting, who has been named president of Quanta Reinsurance Ltd. Mr. Whiting, a veteran of the Bermuda insurance market, will be responsible for the executive management of Quanta Reinsurance Ltd. and any of its Bermuda-domiciled subsidiaries.

Mr. Whiting was most recently with the Bermuda office of Swiss Re. He spent ten years with the company and before joining Quanta, held a senior management position. Previously, Mr. Whiting held positions with the Zurich Insurance Group, Toronto, Canada; the Hartford Insurance Group, Hartford, Connecticut; and in Bermuda with Tillinghast and Centre Re.