On the surface, the FamGuard Insurance Corporation, the parent company of Family Guardian, appears to be holding its own in the fiercely competitive sector, but behind the scenes, top officials are making strategic changes to help recoup millions of dollars that the company has been losing.
In key upper management changes, the President Gerald Strachan and Vice President Wilfred Hepburn are being replaced.
Mr. Strachan, who is expected to remain at the company for the next several months, as a consultant says he is going on early retirement.
While there is no official confirmation about his successor, the Bahama Journal has been reliably informed that Patricia Hermanns is a top candidate for the position of President and Chief Operating Officer.
The company would only say that that a successor would be announced “in due course.”
But the exit of Mr. Hepburn, was not as graceful. Over the Christmas holidays, he received a letter from the company giving him two weeks notice to vacate his position, according to an inside source.
“It was said that the company lost $3 million in two years and Mr. Hepburn was in part blamed for that,” the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said.
A statement from the company went into great detail about Mr. Strachan’s retirement from the company and the advancements that had been made under his leadership, however, it noticeably excluded Mr. Hepburn’s absence.
A new year for FamGuard means more aggressive measures to maintain the company’s position in the insurance industry and stop the financial haemorrhage, which some had attributed in part to the corporation’s acquisition of the Star Insurance Company.
Another official conceded that acquiring Star did not turn out to be the profitable venture that it was expected to be. The company lacked a computerized system and had been relying on a manual data entry technique that was not as efficient.
Now, management is left to oversee a transition to the technologically progressive age. Mr. Hepburn had been primarily responsible for that.
It had been reported in July last year that Family Guardian and Star Insurance might have had to seek a court resolution to an issue arising out of that merger.
Family Guardian, in its annual report, accused Star of misrepresenting itself when it overvalued its assets by a significant amount.
The company was in talks with the principal shareholders of Star due to the company’s reported “undisclosed liabilities” which were said to be a “sizeable sum.”
The Chairman of FamGuard Norbert Boissiere had at that time said that the dispute was not an acrimonious one, explaining that the dispute was only mentioned because the auditors had required anything contentious to be included in the company’s annual statement.
Nevertheless, Family Guardian had demanded the return of $750,000 previously held in an escrow account. The company had also held back on giving Star the full 191,300 shares valued at $717,374, under the merger agreement.
The Bahama Journal
