Case being built against CLICO
Friday May 27 2011 | 03:37 AM

A recently-constituted body, representing hundreds of policyholders and investors in troubled insurer CLICO, is putting together a case that could see a hefty claim being filed in the local courts against the company.

And if representatives of the Barbados Investors & Policyholders Alliance (BIPA) fail to get satisfaction through the ongoing process involving a judicial manager, they are prepared to advise policyholders to cease ongoing payments to the life insurance arm of the financial institution.

This was made clear last night by BIPA lawyer Tariq Khan during a meeting of members at The Ann Johnson Auditorium, St. Gabriel's School, who said they wanted to send a strong message to the political class and others while seeking justice.

The action being contemplated has received the support of Chairman of the Trinidad and Tobago CLICO Policyholders Group Peter Permell, who addressed the gathering, and urged them to reserve their "leverage" to stop policy payments and use it if the situation was not being resolved to their satisfaction.

A new website has been established to gather information from CLICO customers, including those with life insurance policies and pensions as well as those who invested in the Executive Flexible Premium Annuity product

"The website is incredibly important. We need your information and I'll tell you why we need some of that information. Some of you were sworn to policies after the prohibition (to sell) was announced. We need the date when you were sworn to policies, we need to get that data so that we build up our files, build up the type of claim that we are going to service," he said.

"We want to cloud, we want to choke the courts with the lawsuits, we really do, we want to make life miserable, not only for the judiciary, but for the politicians. So please all of the information that you can provide via the website it is absolutely critical."

Both Khan and Permell told those attending the meeting repeatedly that they had more power than they might have thought, including their ability to affect CLICO's revenue.

"Those (policies) are contracts between yourselves and the insurance provider and you have to try to separate that from an annuity policy. When we met with the judicial manager he was very keen that the contributions remained current otherwise you would be in a breach of contract situation," Khan said.

"We are not going to be irresponsible, but what we ought to do is exploit this, the power that we have, and the authority we have by the sheer volume of our numbers to remove this constant source of revenues should we chose to exercise it. So that is a strategy that we ought to adopt.

"At this point in time keep your (life insurance) contributions current and think of an alternative provider, but bear in mind that this gives us leverage, and this is something that we ought to put to the judicial manager."

Permell told BIPA members to give the judicial manager time to do the work, but that they might come a point when they had to take further action.

"What your management team should do is approach the judicial manager once again and advise him that you have policyholders who are not just EFPA policyholders, but ... the ones with the life insurance policies, the ones who pay their pensions and so on, and they are concerned about the future direction and viability of CLICO," he advised.

"And therefore you can give them a reasonable deadline then you are then holding off those policyholders from stopping paying their premiums, from coming in to surrender their policies."

The Trinidadian said this was important because if nothing definitive resulted from the court-appointed judicial manager it would be irresponsible to advise people to continue taking their funds and throw them into "a black hole".