Ace Ltd. is being sued for $133 million at the Grand Court of the Cayman Islands by the Receiver of the Liberian operations of Cigna Worldwide Insurance Company — a complaint that has already been rejected twice by US courts.

The claim relates to two court awards to claimant insureds against Cigna Worldwide in 2000 and 2005 involving liabilities incurred before Ace acquired the Cigna Group for $3.45 billion in July 1999.

The action at the Caymans court was brought on July 9 this year, one day before Ace's shareholders approved, at the company's AGM in Bermuda, a proposal to move Ace's domicile from the Cayman Islands to Switzerland.

Ace general counsel Robert Cusumano told The Royal Gazette that the complainants had gone to the Cayman court because their case had been thrown out in the US. And he said they may have deliberately timed the filing of their claim to try to interfere with the company's redomiciling process.

Two days prior to the completion of its re-domestication being announced on July 18, Ace gave a written undertaking to the Cayman court that its Swiss successor would submit to the jurisdiction following the transfer and pay any sum that the court might order in the case.

The case centres on insurance claims for property damages that took place in 1990, when civil war was raging in the West African country.

The policies issued by Cigna contained a "war risks" exclusion, which barred the claims made by the insured, according to the US courts that have considered the claim over the past decade.

According to the KYC News online newsletter "Inside Bermuda", the liabilities are in the form of two judgments, one for $66.57 million, plus annual interest of six percent, in favour of the Abi Jaoudi and Azar Trading Corporation. The other is for $28.95 million, plus annual interest of six percent in favour of Elegant, Inc. and 22 other Liberian insureds (whose separate claims against Cigna were consolidated into one proceeding) that were entered in Liberia on October 4, 2000 and August 22, 2005, respectively.

Cigna's receiver, Josie Senesie, who is Liberia's Commissioner of Insurance, said Ace was notified of the claim in a letter dated June 18, 2008 but "has not responded and has continued to act in breach of contract and its other legal obligations".

Mr. Cusumano said yesterday: "This claim has been around for a decade and we have already won two final judgements in US courts dismissing these claims."

After losing first in the US District Court of Delaware, the complainants took their claim to the US Court of Appeals for the Third District, where it was once against rejected. The Appeals Court 1997 ruling stated: "The evidence permits no interpretation other than that, from June to October 1990, when the appellants' losses occurred, the events in Liberia constituted an insurrection within the meaning of the war risk exclusion clauses in the Cigna policies."

The claimants were more successful when they took their case to a Liberian court, but when the matter came back to Delaware in 2001, the District Court there imposed an "antisuit injunction" on the insureds on the grounds that the Liberian litigation was "vexatious and duplicative" and that it threatened the US court's jurisdiction.

The US District Court in Delaware threw out further Liberian claims against Cigna in 2002, when the insurer gave its view that the Liberian court system was "beset by corruption".