# Quinn Life's Future



## taytoman (5 Apr 2011)

Does anyone know what is happening with quinn life? Is it up for sale like quinn insurance or is it continuing on as part of the core quinn group?


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## Complainer (10 Apr 2011)

According to this article, the Life arm is up for sale;

http://www.independent.ie/business/...fe-narrows-its-losses-to-euro17m-2441079.html

I'm confused by what the article says about losses, i.e. "€5.6m loss on the realisation of unspecified investments last year"?

I'd have thought that any losses they make are passed straight back to investors - so what would QL itself be losing money on?


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## taytoman (11 Apr 2011)

does'nt sound very encouraging then?


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## jpd (11 Apr 2011)

Life insurance companies invest the premiums they receive and use the income from these investments to pay claims and eventually shareholders.

I haven't read or analysed QL accounts but it would not be unusual for a life insurance company to make profits or losses on investments.

However, there are rules governing the types of investments insurance companies can hold - mostly, the bulk of their investment would be in Government Bonds or liquid instruments.

The fact that they made a loss on a realised investment might even be seen as a good thing - they ditched a bad investment before the loss was even greater.


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## Complainer (11 Apr 2011)

jpd said:


> Life insurance companies invest the premiums they receive and use the income from these investments to pay claims and eventually shareholders.
> 
> I haven't read or analysed QL accounts but it would not be unusual for a life insurance company to make profits or losses on investments.
> 
> ...


Forgive a dumb question, jpd - but do Quinn LIfe actually provide life insurance?

There is no mention of life insurance at 

As far as I know, they provide investments, not life insurance. So again, I'm not sure how they could have lost money themselves.


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## Chris (12 Apr 2011)

Not sure whether Quinn Life provide insurance directly, they may be just the underwriters for products sold by Quinn Direct. Admittedly I don't know for sure.
However, they do provide their own managed funds. It is very common for fund managers to sell certain equities for various reasons even at a loss, most often to re-balance the the fund.
It is also possible that a company they were invested in went bankrupt. As an example I would imagine that their Celtic fund at one time held Anglo shares, which of course would have been written off as a loss at some stage. 
Either way, I think the article is a bit vague in this respect.


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## Complainer (12 Apr 2011)

Chris said:


> However, they do provide their own managed funds. It is very common for fund managers to sell certain equities for various reasons even at a loss, most often to re-balance the the fund.
> It is also possible that a company they were invested in went bankrupt. As an example I would imagine that their Celtic fund at one time held Anglo shares, which of course would have been written off as a loss at some stage.


Yes, but in either of these cases, wouldn't the loss have been to the fund (and passed directly back to investors in the fund) and not a loss to the company itself?


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## Chris (13 Apr 2011)

Complainer said:


> Yes, but in either of these cases, wouldn't the loss have been to the fund (and passed directly back to investors in the fund) and not a loss to the company itself?



Good point, so it probably is not a loss related to fund holdings. This quote from the article you linked to may shed some light: "The accounts note that Quinn Life's 44.5pc share in the Swedish company that controls the Leonardo fund fell in value from €11.9m in 2008 to €7.8m at the end of last year."

This would be an unrealised loss. The company may have had other such investments that were actually realised. As they are not publicly traded I'm not sure how much they have to disclose.


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## taytoman (14 Nov 2011)

*Quinn Life Future*

I have 14 K in quinn life freeway funds (put in 21k.........), thus do not want to pull out at the moment as I can make "gains" up to 21k tax free

Who exactly owns quinn life at the moment, and are they up for sale?


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