Island.

One left the helm of a special purpose insurer set up to provide catastrophe cover for member properties of the Caribbean Hotel Association.

Inside sources said his departure may reap dividends for Bermuda in the long run, if ongoing talks with other local interests develop further.

Robert W. Virtue resigned as president of the CHA Insurance Company Ltd.

(CHAIC) last month and is known to be pursuing other business interests that involve special purpose vehicles that may lead to a future Bermuda domicile.

Mr. Virtue left because he and the board of directors couldn't agree on a strategic direction for CHAIC.

In an unrelated matter, another senior insurance executive, Graham D. Brice, vacated his position as chairman of International Risk Management (Bermuda) Ltd. (IRMBL) and executive vice president of the International Risk Management Group (IRMG).

Mr. Brice may have left under more contentious grounds. He filed a writ in the Supreme Court on July 30 against IRMG parent Swiss Re, International Risk Management Investments Ltd., IRMG Ltd. and IRMBL.

Neither Mr. Brice, nor his lawyers, Trott & Duncan, were available for comment. Industry sources said last week the executive was off the Island.

IRMG president and CEO, Gareth Bradburn, declined to comment on the legal action, saying only that it was in the hands of company lawyers.

The two departures are not related, but ironically Mr. Brice and Mr. Virtue once worked together at the IRM group.

In fact, at the time in 1994, Mr. Brice was being promoted and Mr. Virtue was taking his old job as president of IRMBL.

More recently, Mr. Virtue had been with CHAIC for less than a year as the company's first president. CHAIC was set up last August, in an attempt to stabilise property cover pricing and capacity for Caribbean Hotel Association properties that included Bermuda, but especially the Caribbean.

Fewer and fewer hotel properties in the region were obtaining satisfactory cover in a volatile market that was marked by skyrocketing rates and insufficient cover.

CHAIC was designed with the intent of stabilising the market. But after starting to write business last August, storms wreaked havoc in the Caribbean during the hurricane season, causing unforeseen losses that sucked out 29 percent of its capital.

Originally capitalised with $24 million, the company was going into a second year of writings, capitalised at $17 million.

They were expecting an improvement on last year's start-up premium writings of $1.2 million, when just 11 hotels were participating. For this full year, the company was targeting 120 hotels.

Now, Mr. Virtue's departure has led to the secondment of a Centre Re underwriter to CHAIC. Centre Re president, David Brown, said it was to ensure that "things get done over there in the interim'' while the company searches for a new senior executive.

He said of the company: "CHA Insurance Company took an unfortunate hit in its start-up. That's a danger with any start-up company. That's life in the insurance business. "The reinsurers, ourselves and CAT Ltd., and shareholders supported the company, effectively recapitalised it, and are moving forward.

We are very much committed to the goal of the CHA.'' As regards Mr. Virtue, Mr. Brown would not discuss the matter in detail. But he said, "It was a decision made between Bob and the board. Often in business, you get a difference between the board of directors and the senior executives. We are moving in a different direction than before.

"There can always be differing views on the nature or risks you accept, how it's placed in the insurance market, how you manage the business. There's just different views on the strategic direction of a company, what it should write, how much it should write, how much reinsurance it should buy. There's always a chance of there being a basic difference in philosophy between a board and an executive.'' Mr. Virtue is a 32-year veteran of the industry, having worked with the Continental Insurance Group and ARMCO, Inc., serving more than two decades in Paris as president and chief executive of Compagnie Europeanne de Reassurance.

Meanwhile, Mr. Brice started in insurance in 1972 with General Accident Fire & Life Assurance Company Ltd. and worked for the company in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, before joining American International in Bermuda in 1984. He began with IRMBL in 1991.

ROBERT VIRTUE -- Pursuing other business interests.