LONDON OFFICE OF INDIA’S GIC WILL OPEN NEXT WEEK

India’s state-owned reinsurer GIC Re is to send Indian finance minister Palaniappan Chidambaram to officially open the reinsurer’s London office next Wednesday. GIC will write business directly from the UK for the first time, focusing initially on property, aviation and energy-related risks. GIC Re general manager R Chandrasekaran said that “we have operated a representative office in London for a number of years but until now haven’t been licensed to write business directly. Without full branch status, we were required to pass potential business leads to Mumbai, which was a slow process and meant that we were missing out on contracts. That will all change now”. Anil Sant has been appointed Chief Manager for the London branch. GIC was created in 1972 when India’s insurance sector was nationalised. The company has had internationalisation somewhat forced upon it as a result of a loss of guaranteed business at home. Previously, the mandatory ceding requirement to GIC for Indian insurers was 20%, but this has been reduced to 15% and will fall to 10% in financial year 2008-09. The reinsurer posted a net profit for 2006-07 of Rp15.31bn ($385m), up from Rp5.98bn the year before. It wrote net premiums of Rp64.2bn, up 52% year on year.