“I don't know how he forgot or ignored the fact that $22 billion in claims was paid and sent back to the United States following the storms of 2005″ by Bermuda companies, said Mr. Kramer.

The Bermuda executive said he was directly responding to a remark Mr. Berkley made during the Credit Suisse First Boston conference last Friday. The remark, which Mr. Kramer quoted verbatim, was “'My goal is to level the playing field so those free riders in Bermuda don't get to suck our money out and give us nothing back.'”

“Boy, that was really hostile,” Mr. Kramer said yesterday as his delivered the keynote speech at the luncheon, “I'm not sure what triggered this,” he said.

Last Thursday, Mr. Berkley, participating on the opening panel of the 18th Annual Executive Conference for the Property-Casualty Industry, revealed the trigger. He reported that a Bermuda competitor writing a similar amount of U.S. commercial business to his company last year paid only $19 million in taxes, while W.R. Berkley paid $260 million.

“My goal is to get those guys to pay taxes,” he said. It's my number one compensation goal for 2007,” he said, noting that he was going to pursue this with Democrat leaders in Congress.

A day later, at the Credit Suisse conference, Mr. Berkley said he had already set up meetings with Congressman Charles Rangel, D-New York, Senator Max Baucus, D-Montana, and five other Senate and House leaders.

“You can't spend money unless you can find revenues. So the Democrats are going to be very motivated to find revenue,” since there's a deficit, he said.

Noting that his company has been working on a draft bill to present to the lawmakers, he said last Friday, “We're going to hand it to them.”

He said he was planning to hold his first meeting this past Monday. It was not known if that session took place.

Characterizing Mr. Berkley's view as “myopic,” Mr. Kramer took note of other remarks Mr. Berkley made during the Credit Suisse conference, explaining why his company is not in the catastrophe business.

“We haven't found ways to get appropriate risk-adjusted returns,” Mr. Berkley said. “If we're going to accept volatility, we want to be paid.”

Mr. Kramer responded: “Bermuda accepts 50 percent of the world's cat business at those unattractive risk-adjusted returns. It stands to reason that if you accept [Mr. Berkley's] premise for not writing the business, then premiums sent to Bermuda are transferring risk on very favorable terms.”

“That doesn't square with [the] comment that we're free riders,” he said. If the Democratic Congress isn't smart enough to ignore Mr. Berkley's proposal, then lawmakers will be “choking off the supply of property reinsurance, which Mr. Berkley himself won't write [and] a lot of people will suffer,” he said, noting later that both the Florida insurance commissioner and Gov. Jeb Bush made trips to Bermuda because of property insurance issues in their state.