Help

BI’s Article search uses Boolean search capabilities. If you are not familiar with these principles, here are some quick tips.

To search specifically for more than one word, put the search term in quotation marks. For example, “workers compensation”. This will limit your search to that combination of words.

To search for a combination of terms, use quotations and the & symbol. For example, “hurricane” & “loss”.

Login Register Subscribe

Appeals court rules for insurer in D&O case

Reprints

A Chubb Corp. unit is not obligated to indemnify Nomura Holding America Inc. under an exclusion in its claims made directors & officers policies, because the lawsuits the company faced were related to earlier litigation filed before the policy period, says an appeals court, in affirming a lower court ruling.

New York-based Nomura had been sued in 2008 in connection with its residential mortgage-backed securities, according to court papers in Nomura Holding America Inc. v. Federal Insurance Co.

Nomura subsequently purchased three successive one-year policies from Federal Insurance, a unit of Warren, New Jersey-based Chubb, covering the period July 2010 to July 2013. The policies included an exclusion that “all related claims shall be treated as a single claim first made on the date the earliest of such related claims was first made.”

Five lawsuits were filed against Nomura in 2011 and 2012. Federal denied coverage in part because the insurers said these involved related claims that were “substantially similar” to those in the 2008 litigation. Nomura filed suit in federal District Court in New York in August 2013.

The U.S. District Court in New York ruled in favor of Chubb in September 2014, and a three-judge panel of the 2nd U.S. District Court of Appeals in New York upheld the ruling in a summary order issued last week.

“As the District Court's side-by-side review of the underlying claims and the (2008 claim) demonstrated, there is no genuine dispute that the claims in the five underlying lawsuits are 'related claims,' ” said the appeals court.

An appeals court upheld a lower court ruling and held last week that Axis Insurance Co. was not obligated to indemnify a truck fleet operator under terms of its excess policy because the underlying primary policy's limits had not been exhausted.

Read Next