No relief for besieged insurer
The search for a buyer for the Daewoo insurance company has been on going since the Korean car maker fell into crisis.
Tadeusz Soroka, MD of the insurance company Daewoo TU, has been saying since last autumn that the Polskie Konsorcjum Finansowe (PKF) will be taking over the insurer.
PKF was originally supposed to have taken over the company by last Christmas, a deadline extended to March and then extended to 23 May.
At the time of writing the make up of the consortium which is coming to the rescue of the insurer is still not clear. According to daily Rzeczpospolita, the PKF is made up of two banks and several Silesian and southern companies which include coal operators Weglozbyt and the southern energy concern PKE. However it would seem that these companies themselves have little faith in the consortium and doubt its ability to have any success.
Jan Kurp, MD of PKE says that he received an offer to join PKF but no decision to join the consortium had been taken.
Alfred Dudek, deputy director of Weglozbyt said that there were very initial conversations but any investment by his company was most unlikely.
One can only conclude that the chances of the Polskie Konsorcjum Finansowe raising the PLN105m necessary to take the shares in the Daewoo insurance company as not being very high. In the insurance world there are few that believe that Daewoo TU can be saved by the PKF. There are not many more who believe that the consortium even exists.
One managing director of a major insurance company said that he did not believe that Daewoo TU could be saved by a secret consortium.
Zygmunt Kostkiewicz, MD of PZU, believes that an emergency management committee which is usually reserved only for use in cases of near bankruptcy, should be brought into Daewoo as soon as possible. This, he claims, may help the company find an investor.
It would seem that at a presentation given to the insurer\'s organisation PIU, the shareholders of the PKF were not mentioned. The presentation was given by Tadeusz Soroka and Anatol Adamski, the MD of Daewoo Życie, the life assurance arm of Daewoo TU.
The difficulties of Daewoo TU have worried the insurance watchdog PUNU. Danuta Walcerz, the chairperson of PUNU, would very much like to avoid another bankruptcy in the sector after already have suffered two. Nonetheless the bureau clearly does not believe that PKF can rescue the company. One course of action would be for market leader PZU to take the insurance portfolio of Daewoo TU. The former managing director of PZU Zycie, Grzegorz Wieczerzak, has already proposed this. It is considered that PZU is large enough to take on this burden. Nonetheless the current MD of PZU, Zygmunt Kostkiewicz, says that he is not interested in this solution although he does not rule it out altogether.
Another proposal was that insurance companies which are on the road to bankruptcy would have the right to preferential credits which would be funded by other insurance companies. This proposal was refused by profitable companies who said that they would not finance non-effective management. The fact that PUNU is now considering rescue operations show that the watchdog does not believe that an external investor for Daewoo TU can be found.
The insurer is still closely tied to the Korean concern. It was founded to support the sales of Daewoo cars. It offered good deals but the parts for Daewoo cars are expensive and the Korean car giant was the exclusive distributor. In that way the money stayed within the company.
In these circumstances it seems that PUNU will have no other option but to force an emergency management committee.