“It just can’t go on like, ‘Oh, we’re trying to cooperate, but we can’t get on the phone from here to Dusseldorf,'” said Rubinstein, a Los Angeles lawyer.
Michael Jacobs, the administrative law judge presiding over the state hearing, gave Munich Re until yesterday to turn over treaties and policyholder lists it had promised to provide in a September 1999 stipulation.
Hoping that Jacobs would take more extreme and immediate measures, Rubinstein clearly was unhappy with the decision.
“To give any delays is to play back into the worldwide strategy of delay, delay, delay,” Rubinstein told the judge. “Every delay, another survivor dies.”
Rubinstein has been retained by the state to help develop a registry of Holocaust victims, survivors and their heirs who might have unpaid insurance claims.
There is also an international commission looking into Holocaust-era claims, but California’s insurance chief, Chuck Quackenbush, asserts that the body hasn’t been as quick or as stern as it should be.
So starting April 6, a new California law will enable Quackenbush to yank the state licenses of companies that don’t make broad disclosures of policies issued in Europe from 1920 to 1945.
At two sets of hearings in December, some insurance companies said they will cooperate with the new Holocaust Registry Law; a few others gave indications they would not.
From the get-go, Munich Re showed signs it would cooperate. In September, it signed the agreement with the state to turn over important Holocaust-era insurance documents. The company reiterated its commitment at the December hearing in San Francisco.
Rubinstein said he was still waiting for many of those documents.
“That is not compliance; that is delay,” he told the judge. “The strategy of insurers and reinsurers is to stretch out this debate another 50 years until every survivor is dead, and then fight off the heirs.”
If Munich Re failed to make satisfactory progress by yesterday, Rubinstein planned to ask Jacobs to issue a court order to enforce the stipulation today during a 1 p.m. telephone hearing.
And if the company doesn’t comply with that order, it could be in danger of losing its license to do business in California.
Munich Re — the world’s largest reinsurer “both then and now,” said Rubinstein — is also on the hot seat with the International Commission on Holocaust Era Claims. The company is contending it falls outside the scope of that body.
In a Jan. 21 letter to Neal Sher, the international commission’s chief of staff, Munich Re asserts it “never issued any insurance policies, does not have any relevant insurance policy records and does not control any insurers which issued insurance policies in Europe during the Holocaust era.”
A reinsurance company insures other insurance companies by assuming all or part of the risk in existing policies.
Munich Re, however, in a 1998 filing with New York state regulators, apparently listed more than 20 affiliated firms that possibly could have issued a policy to a Holocaust victim between 1920 and 1945.
One of those companies is Victoria, based in Dusseldorf, Germany. A brief filed by Rubinstein contends Munich Re “controls” Victoria through a 60 percent ownership of ERGO Insurance Group, which in turn owns 99 percent of Victoria.
Rubinstein said Munich Re agreed in September to provide Holocaust-era policyholder lists issued by Victoria. However, those lists had yet to be provided as of last week.
At last Friday’s hearing, Munich Re’s attorney Martin Checov told the judge, “There’s no reason to believe we’re drawing a line in the sand.”
Rubinstein begged to differ.
Because Munich Re voluntarily agreed to the stipulation in September, Rubinstein said, it is absurd for the company to now try to hide behind Germany’s privacy law or bemoan its lack of control over Victoria.
Moreover, Munich Re has asked for a hearing to claim that it is outside the jurisdiction of the California Holocaust Registry Law. That hearing is scheduled for Wednesday.
“The stipulation was designed to prevent this very type of argument,” Rubinstein emphasized to the judge. He called Munich Re’s “shift” of understanding of the stipulation “exceedingly disturbing.”