It was not so simple as “insurers want this”. Each party had a different interest, depending on what layers they were exposed to.
The really key ruling was one in which a judge determined that it was not a defect in a ruling if it counted occurrences differently from some other ruling. The judge ruled that this was a subject of fact that a jury was competent to determine, and that the right determination could be different in different rulings.
The final result was incredibly complicated, with some contracts being treated as subject to one occurrence and others being treated as two, based in part on the details of the contract language in each contract, and in part on what different juries decided.
I think the UK courts that adjudicated most of the syndicate reinsurance ruled that most of the contracts should be interpreted as two occurrences, but there were other rulings.
One of the issues that made it especially tricky is that the primary insurance had been bound, but the contract hadn’t actually been finalized. And a lot of the reinsurance contracts referred to the primary language. But back in the day, reinsurance deals (and other large, one-off deals like this) were routinely made based on scribbles on cocktail napkins. And while this was a little more formal, there was a lot that had been left unwritten.
Insurance (and reinsurance) deals are more formal since then, with a lot more care put into detailing what counts as an occurrence.
But it was a while ago now, and I may have gotten some details wrong.
Found out today that there was murder(?) on the next street over two days ago. Seems like some “home health aides” tried to rob the guy (75 years old, lived alone), tied him up, beat him and he eventually died. They stole like $37 and his car. Pretty scary how close it was to us. Used to walk by the place regularly when we had a dog to walk.
Always crazy when stuff like that happens close to home.
When I was kid delivering newspapers back when that was a thing there was an older couple on my route who had a pretty messed up son, I always new he was a little odd but not how odd until one day he decided to kill both his parents. It was on a Saturday when I usually did my collections, thankfully I had something else going on that day or I might have showed up at their house while it was going on.
There was a kid when I was in junior high who was found dead in the woods not far from my house. He had been killed by a shotgun blast, his gun. We were all told it was an accident, but we didn’t buy it. We all knew he had a lot of issues and that suicide was equally as likely.
On the murder, supposedly, there was a home health aide who had a couple friends. She let them into the house, they tied up the guy and beat him pretty badly. He ultimately died from this. Then they took the car and left. They were supposedly going to come back and move the body and start living in the house. Neighbor used to check on the old guy and when there was no response, he called the cops who found him. Seems like a one off where it wasn’t a random event, so a bit less scary.
It began in July 2017, when the MV Aman was detained at the Egyptian port of Adabiya. The cargo ship was held because it had expired safety equipment and classification certificates.
It should have been easy enough to resolve, but the ship’s Lebanese contractors failed to pay for fuel and the MV Aman’s owners in Bahrain were in financial difficulty.
With the ship’s Egyptian captain ashore, a local court declared Mohammed, the ship’s chief officer, the MV Aman’s legal guardian.
Mohammed, who was born in the Syrian Mediterranean port of Tartus, says he wasn’t told what the order meant and only found out months later, as the ship’s other crew members started to leave.
For four years, life - and death - passed Mohammed by. He watched as ships sailed past, in and out of the nearby Suez Canal.
…
By August 2019, Mohammed was alone but for the occasional guard and trapped on a vessel with no diesel and, consequently, no power. He was legally obliged to stay aboard and was unpaid, demoralised and feeling increasingly unwell.
…
Astonishing as Mohammed’s story is, his experience is not unique. In fact, seafarer abandonment is on the rise.
For months, the 29-year-old Syrian had been the last sailor still living on a cargo ship, abandoned two years earlier near the mouth of the Suez Canal and being detained by the Egyptian government. They had refused to let him disembark but couldn’t keep him on the ship if it was sinking, he reasoned.
He activated an emergency beacon and shouted “Mayday! Mayday!” into the radio. Hours crawled by before a military patrol arrived to whisk him to land.
Ten days of interrogations in military and police stations later, Mr. Mohammad was right back where he started, returned to a deserted ship whose hull had been repaired. It was Oct. 27, 2019, and he wasn’t going anywhere.
Nearly 1,000 sailors were abandoned at sea last year, according to the International Maritime Organization, which tracks such data. The true toll is likely much higher, said Jan de Boer, a senior IMO legal officer. “We only see the tip of the iceberg,” he said. “And we see a lot.”
When a ship’s owner runs out of money, crew members often wind up unpaid and unable to get home or feed themselves. Ports, insurers, officials from the vessel’s flag state and embassies representing the various nationalities on board often shrug off responsibility for resolving the impasse. Some governments require the crew to remain aboard.
The court said it would issue a judgment on Mr. Aisha’s case by April 11, his lawyers assured him, and if it ruled favorably, he could fly home immediately. On April 15, news reached Mr. Aisha that his grandmother had died.
“I will never forgive the people who kept me here while I lost my family, one by one,” he said.
On April 20, Mr. Aisha got a call from an immigration officer telling him to pack his bags. Swimming out to the MV Aman, he began to gather his things. Walking a final circuit of the vessel that had been his home for four years, he thought: “I never want to see this damn ship again.”
I remember going to a destination wedding in Maui in 2009 during the recession. It was really sad. It was good to be there spending money because they obviously desperately needed it. And everything was heavily discounted and it was no trouble booking anything you wanted to book: booze cruise, snorkeling, tee times, reservations were not necessary at any restaurant… even Kimo’s. So given that I had a job making ASA money it was a great time to go.
Every place our group went we just about had the place to ourselves. Restaurants, shops, bars…
Walking around the airport waiting for my flight out it was shocking. I hadn’t really noticed when I arrived because I was focused on getting to the condo where we were staying. But on the way out I was walking around and saw the signs of no tourism. Whole sections of the airport with no one in them. No tourists, no employees… they didn’t even have the lights turned on.
And one of the waiters at one of the restaurants had mentioned that we came at a good time because they’d just moved a lot of rental cars back to Maui because things were picking up as the economy was starting to recover. If that was what “picking up” looked like I can’t begin to imagine how bad it must have been six months earlier.
But it did draw my attention to the fact that they do move rental cars around based on demand.
