ABSTRACT
In insurance dealings, corporate governance is a pressing issue, and it has always been so. At the heart of its modern history stands an incident in which the forces unleashed by a chain of acquisitions–notably that of London Guarantee and Accident in 1922 - and a crucial demerger put a special strain upon its corporate governance. The rationalisation strategy aimed at an improvement in corporate governance through a tidier divisionalisation of the corporate morass produced by the double acquisition. Phoenix Assurance was one of the top six British offices for much of the 20th Century, and traded as an independent insurer from 1782 until 1984. Between 1870 and 1914, Phoenix moved towards becoming a genuine multinational corporation. The cost to Phoenix was to be the loss of the far more valuable Norwich Union Fire, which Phoenix had acquired by 1920. The offices acquired were the Norwich Union Fire and the London Guarantee and Accident.
