TRUST PROPERTY AND UNJUST ENRICHMENT: TRACING INTO THE PROCEEDS OF LIFE INSURANCE POLICIES

2000 ◽  
Vol 59 (3) ◽  
pp. 421-471
Author(s):  
Craig Rotherham

FOSKETT v. McKeown [2000] 2 W.L.R. 1299 concerned the aftermath of a property development scheme in the Algarve marketed by one Mr. Murphy. 220 customers (“the purchasers”) entered into contracts which provided that after two years they would each be conveyed a specified plot of land or their money would be repaid with interest. Unless and until the purchasers’ money was used for the stated purposes it was to be held on trust. However, at the expiration of the specified period, it was discovered that the trust money had been misappropriated. While much of the trust money was untraceable, Murphy had applied around £20,000 of it to pay the fourth and fifth premiums of a life insurance policy that was settled in favour of his wife and children (“the beneficiaries”). In 1991, after his malfeasance was exposed, Murphy committed suicide. The insurance policy yielded a death benefit of £1,000,000. The question to be resolved was whether the use of the purchasers’ money to pay some of the premiums gave them any interest in the death benefit.

Crisis ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 217-223 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Yip ◽  
David Pitt ◽  
Yan Wang ◽  
Xueyuan Wu ◽  
Ray Watson ◽  
...  

Background: We study the impact of suicide-exclusion periods, common in life insurance policies in Australia, on suicide and accidental death rates for life-insured individuals. If a life-insured individual dies by suicide during the period of suicide exclusion, commonly 13 months, the sum insured is not paid. Aims: We examine whether a suicide-exclusion period affects the timing of suicides. We also analyze whether accidental deaths are more prevalent during the suicide-exclusion period as life-insured individuals disguise their death by suicide. We assess the relationship between the insured sum and suicidal death rates. Methods: Crude and age-standardized rates of suicide, accidental death, and overall death, split by duration since the insured first bought their insurance policy, were computed. Results: There were significantly fewer suicides and no significant spike in the number of accidental deaths in the exclusion period for Australian life insurance data. More suicides, however, were detected for the first 2 years after the exclusion period. Higher insured sums are associated with higher rates of suicide. Conclusions: Adverse selection in Australian life insurance is exacerbated by including a suicide-exclusion period. Extension of the suicide-exclusion period to 3 years may prevent some “insurance-induced” suicides – a rationale for this conclusion is given.


The problem of computing risk measures of life insurance policies is complicated by the fact that two different probability measures, the real-world probability measure along the risk horizon and the risk-neutral one along the remaining time interval, have to be used. This implies that a straightforward application of the Monte Carlo method is not available and the need arises to resort to time consuming nested simulations or to the least squares Monte Carlo approach. We propose to compute common risk measures by using the celebrated binomial model of Cox, Ross, and Rubinstein (1979) (CRR). The main advantage of this approach is that the usual construction of the CRR model is not influenced by the change of measure and a unique lattice can be used along the whole policy duration. Numerical results highlight that the proposed algorithm computes highly accurate values.


Author(s):  
Mihir Dash ◽  
Lalremtluangi C. ◽  
Snimer Atwal ◽  
Supriya Thapar

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