The last of Executive Life Insurance Co.'s policyholders will get an average of 92.5 cents on the dollar in settlement for their policies - much more than they were originally promised, California insurance regulators said Monday.
They could get their final checks by next spring, sooner than originally thought, the officials said.Chuck Quackenbush, California's insurance commissioner, made the promise at a press conference in New York at the annual meeting of the National Association of Insurance Commissioners.
Quackenbush said the state was close to liquidating the last of Executive Life's assets, having taken 21/2 years instead of the originally promised five to do so.
The company, which had 60 percent of its assets invested in risky junk bonds, went under in 1991 after the junk bond market collapsed. Since then, the Insurance Department has sought to reimburse its policyholders.
The company had about 350,000 policies outstanding, about 92 percent of which were small ones made whole by state insurance guaranty funds. The remaining 8 percent had been expected to end up with about 86 cents on the dollar, but instead will get an average of 92.5 cents, Quackenbush said.
Maureen Marr, leader of a policyholders group that is fighting the settlement, said the Insurance Department figures were misleading.
The 92.5 percent figure is an average, and some policyholders are getting a lot less than that, Marr charged. And because the value of the policies was assigned a new, lower market value when the company was reorganized, policyholders are "getting 92.5 percent of this lower new policy value. It makes my blood boil."
Christopher Maisel, a deputy insurance commissioner, confirmed that about 2,500 structured settlements - big insurance settlements that were invested by the insurance company to pay an accident victim's living and medical expenses - were far from made whole. In a few cases, the settlements will be as low as 55 cents on the dollar.
"We did what we could," he said.