In a questionable use of shareholders’ funds in a futile legal petition Aviva has filed a Requête en interprétation de judgement – a petition to clarify the meaning of a judgment - in the French Court seeking to review, yet again, the clear decision of the Tribunal de Grand Instance – France’s High Court – in August 2014 in favour of Max–Hervé George.
A spokesman for Max-Hervé George said:
“Aviva’s latest legal move, a full nine months after the August 2014 ruling, clearly has nothing to do with discovering what the judges had meant. It seems that Aviva is struggling to understand what everyone else in France finds crystal clear. This is nothing more than a clear stalling tactic that smacks of Aviva being in psychological and institutional denial about the financial size of the legal problem it faces from these contracts.”
Mr. George holds an international selection policy with Aviva Vie which includes an arbitrage clause at a ‘known price’, giving him the option of switching from one fund to another within the policy and backdating it to the closing price of the previous week.
In court documents which came to light this week, but which were filed on 20th May, Aviva now claims it does not comprehend the judgment handed down by the Tribunal de Grand Instance on 27 August 2014 which gave the George family €9.5m in lost earnings from the company’s failure to respect the terms of their life assurance contracts from 1997-2007 alone. To date, Aviva has now been required to pay out more than €20m for such contracts.
For the 1997-2007 period alone, the 27 August judgment gives those contract holders a 68% compound average growth rate which when continued beyond 2007 would be worth in excess of €120m by 2015 for Max-Hervé George alone. Prior to this most recent attempt to clarify what a French court’s ruling meant, Aviva had already tried and failed this March to suspend the clear provisional execution of the 27 August 2014 judgment. The result was that the company had to comply with the original ruling and pay half the awarded damages.
Aside from failing to come to terms with the August 2014 ruling, Aviva also continues to struggle with how it must respond to a related Cours de Cassation – France’s Supreme Court - ruling in September 2014. This forces the company thereafter to respect the full terms of the life assurance contract. In response to these failings, Mr. George has recently written to ACPR, the French insurance regulator, the EIOPA, the EU’s insurance regulator and the Banque de France, to highlight his concerns about the company’s failure to respect the rulings of France’s Supreme Court.
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