President and CEO of International Property Catastrophe Re, Mr. John Dowling, will outline what Bermuda has to offer in capacity in the world reinsurance market in a EuroForum conference in London, next February.

Mr. Dowling will join with other industry leaders to provide an analysis of the current state of the catastrophe reinsurance market and expert strategies for survival in the risky and competitive market.

The two day conference is to be attended by a broad spectrum of insurance professionals, who will hear Mr. Dowling's perspective on the scale of catastrophe losses in the past compared with what can be expected in the future.

He will also look at the current capacity and demand. The conference comes as reinsurers have been reviewing their traditional ways of doing business, after those with US exposures face current loss estimates of $7.2 billion from the Los Angeles earthquake.

The panel will include the CEO of the UK's largest reinsurer, Mercantile and General Reinsurance Company Ltd., Mr. John Engestrom, who will speak on the impact of catastrophes on the reinsurance industry.

Mr. Dowling recently returned from a London Insurance and Reinsurance Market Association (LIRMA) forum, where he dismissed the notion that Bermuda was a threat to the London market, and advanced the view that the two markets needed each other.

He said the London market was lacking in skilled underwriters and that Bermuda's influx of capital was as a result of the vacuum in the market. He defended the Bermuda market as having been criticised for having too little capacity at first, and then having too much after last summer's $4 billion influx.

As the conference looked forward to the renewal season through to the end of December, Mr. Dowling denied that the new Bermuda companies were making major moves to branch out into other lines of business to attract more premiums.