the first time April 10 at the Number One Shed in Hamilton to decide on the need for a permanent liquidator, a committee of inspection and the completion of the liquidation.

It is expected that the liquidation will be finalised once that meeting has been held and payments to creditors have been cleared.

Creditors are now receiving by post, cheques totaling about $640,000 for the only dividends that will be paid. The pay-out represents 27 cents on the dollar of approved claims.

Mr. Gil Tucker of Kempe & Whittle, said in his report: "The liquidation has proved very complex, and the legal hurdles encountered have both held up the payment of policyholders, and resulted in more work required by the provisional liquidator than originally anticipated.'' The total cost of the liquidation is expected to be some $405,000, comprising $375,000 already spent, and an additional $30,000 that was withheld in anticipation of being spent in finalising the liquidation.

Those sums, together with the $640,000 being paid out to creditors, was all the money the liquidator was able to collect, totaling $1,045,000.

The total debts of the Bermuda branch of the Trinidadian company were $2,351,139. The Bermuda Government as the preferred shareholder was owed $9,280. There were debts to the life insurance creditors of $2,093,023, although under the scheme they will end up with a combined sum of about $565,000.

Medical creditors were owed $115,548 and trade creditors were owed $35,858.

And staff will receive a total of about $26,300 of their approved combined claim of $97,430.

The staff recently lost a Supreme Court battle for their total contributions to a compulsory pension scheme they paid into.

The interim provisional liquidator, Mr. Tucker, first arrived at the Cedar Avenue office in 1992 to find company records were virtually all manually kept and computer records had to be prepared to enable him to do a number of things including send out mailings and calculate amounts due to policyholders.

The limited supply of company funds was evident from the beginning, necessitating immediate action by the liquidator to close the office, sell off furniture and terminate staff employment.

In a continuing effort to reduce expenses, the court ordered that the dividend be paid before the first creditors' meeting.

United Security Life closed its doors in August 1992, when its assets were discovered to be insufficient to pay its liabilities and it was declared insolvent.

It soon came to light that Government had been aware of the company's problems for five years, but allowed staff and policyholders to continue paying into the company. Trinidadian officials claimed the local authorities knew the company was insolvent.

The liquidator said that prior to 1987, substantial sums of money were transferred from Bermuda to other branch operations in different countries. He said in his report: "These were in the form of loans, but none of these amounts have been repaid, and after 1987, the Bermuda branch did not send any further funds abroad.'' USL was incorporated in Trinidad in 1963 and the Bermuda branch opened in 1964 as a non-resident insurance undertaking (NRIU). There were several branches in Caribbean countries.

About 3,900 Bermuda policies in life and medical insurance were written in Trinidad.

The company closed after attempts to sell the operations to other local insurers failed.