Insurable Interest Case Study

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A parent company and its subsidiary are two separate entities which mean that they act independent of each other. In our scenario, the subsidiary companies specialize in different areas of work. It is in that light that a subsidiary company may carry out its functions independently including the duty of protecting its own productive assets if it deems this fruitful. Thus the subsidiary company may purchase insurance under its own name and manage its own contract.

Insurable Interest Law

If however the parent company wants to insure the assets of the subsidiary, the parent company must be able to present Insurable Interest (together with other factors beyond the scope of this report) to the insurer, that is, an insurance contract requires the presence of Insurable Interest. When an insurance contract is taken out, insurers tend to put little emphasis on the existence of Insurable interest in order to get customers on board. However, in many cases, the insurer has repudiated claims when it is discovered that the asset that was insured does not belong to the insured (which is very likely to be unfurled in the investigation when a loss occurs) claiming the absence of Insurable Interest.

Insurable Interest concept was adopted from the English Insurance Laws and it is for this reason that the English Insurance Laws are in agreement with South African ones. The term ‘Insurable Interest’, refers to the insured’s interest or concern in the non-occurrence of the event insured against. This confers that the policy holder is expected to derive some gain from the continued existence of the item being insured and will suffer financial loss if this item is destroyed or lost. For an illustration, one derives benefit from insuring their personal...

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...n the entity that owned the vessel. When the matter was taken to the courts, the court held that the presence or absence of an insurable interest was not the only requirement, though it was a relevant to determine whether the contract was a wager or not. It was established that the contract was not a wager. The issue of Insurable interest was tackled by reference to the case of Littlejohn. While the court considered that the insured's temporary right of use of the "Buccaneer" was, by itself, insufficient to maintain insurance cover measured with reference to the replacement value of the vessel, however Lorcom held 100% of the shares in the firm that owned the vessel and as a major shareholder, he held interest in the company's assets, therefore this gave him insurable interest. The Insurance Company, Zurich was ordered to pay R2.85million in addition to Interest.

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