The National Association of Mutual Insurance Companies has joined New York Superintendent of Insurance Howard Mills in criticizing the methods Attorney General Eliot Spitzer has used to probe the insurance industry.
Robert Detlefsen, NAMIC public policy director, lashed out at what he termed Mr. Spitzer's "heavy-handed, self-aggrandizing tactics."
"It speaks well of Mr. Mills that he is more interested in maintaining the overall health of the industry than in grabbing headlines and preening before television cameras," he said.
Mr. Detlefsen's slam followed up on a speech Mr. Mills gave Friday at a business forum where he said Mr. Spitzer's probes of commercial insurance bid-rigging and improper accounting transactions could have been done without costing thousands of insurance industry workers their jobs and hurting stockholders.
Mr. Spitzer's office has responded that Mr. Mills a Republican former assemblyman was engaging in a partisan attack on the Democratic attorney general and the worth of the investigations was shown by the fact that brokerage firms in settlements had agreed to return millions of dollars to customers and the companies had agreed to stop improper practices.
NAMIC is the second insurance trade group to verbally blast Mr. Spitzer's industry probe activity. In early May, Ernst Csiszar, president of the Property Casualty Insurers Association of America, labeled his investigations "corporate terrorism."
Up until then industry representatives had been relatively silent in any criticism of the investigations that have so shaken the industry so as not to appear to acquiesce to any of the wrongdoing.
The National Association of Insurance Commissioners has taken pains to be seen as responding quickly to the broker compensation scandal with a series of measures aimed at greater disclosure.
Even Mr. Mills has proposed tough new disclosure measures earlier this year in the wake of Mr. Spitzer's investigation into accounting abuses in connection with finite reinsurance products.
Spitzer spokesman Darren Dopp noted that Mr. Mills' background as a Republican partisan politician would make him a questionable critic of the man who is now seen as the leading Democratic candidate for governor next year, partly as a result of his investigations into the financial services industry.
Mr. Dopp said the investigations are at a critical juncture and any injection of partisan rancor by the GOP-appointed superintendent would be ill-advised.
"Just what investigations would they not have conducted," he asked.
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