About

Due to the nature of the reinsurance market and its esteemed place within this, NASCO Re’s highly organised and well-drilled team is one of the most experienced within the Middle East at managing and dealing with a large volume of claims. Head of legal Robert Habchi provides some detail as to the team’s strategy for dealing with this high workload effectively: ‘As the leading reinsurance broker in the Middle East, we have to deal with a substantial number of claims and potential legal cases. 98% of the time we avoid legal cases by promptly taking necessary measures. As for the increasing number of claims, we developed systems enabling us to automatically collect data, giving us a clear and global overview on specific accounts’. The team is regularly tasked with managing extremely high value deals. Among others, Habchi mentions the Dubai real estate deal finalised for around US$400m at the end of 2015. This highly complex deal was enabled via involving ‘major worldwide reinsurers’, hinting at the mediation role that the company is required to play on cross-border deals. ‘We usually deal with such big cases of several millions, being quite complex, as involving companies/individuals from various countries’, Habchi explains. ‘For instance, a claim may occur in Dubai, and be placed on the reinsurance side in Europe. In the case of a dispute, or difference in interpretation in a reinsurance contract, maintaining the relationship between the parties and solving the issue requires a sharp sense of a variety legal systems or ways of thinking’. In response to the rapidly changing political realities of the Middle East which the company is particularly exposed to, Habchi has endeavoured to ‘maximise our rapidity and efficiency of action to be able to react quickly and adequately to any change which may occur’. Among the rest of the team, Samah El Husseini came in for particular praise on the back of her ‘meticulous follow up, analytical skills, and good relationship with clients’, which allowed the company to be ‘even closer to our clients, partners or lawyers which led to greater efficiency’.