It took four well-known businessmen just days to decide to try and buy their company from its parent company once they found out it was up for sale.

But it took months to finalise the deal and secure ownership of the captive management company where they had worked for more than a decade.

Nicholas Dove, Adrian Lee-Emery, Nicholas Frost and Larry Turnbull had worked at Sinser Insurance Ltd since the 1980s.

The Sinser Group of Companies, a world-wide group of 16 companies, was owned by Skandia. But as the parent company moved away from the property/casualty market, the Sinser Group did not fit into the core business of the insurance giant and was put up for sale.

At that time the four men tried to buy out the Bermuda part of the group but Sinser was up for sale as a job lot and in August went under the hammer to US insurance giant Aon.

When asked when they thought about buying the company, Mr. Lee-Emery said: "August 4".

Since then the businessmen have been hammering out a deal to go it alone and this week announced they had signed a deal which left them as the principals of the Bermuda section of the business.

Now the men will keep on the existing business of the company, which is the fourth largest captive manager on the Island after Aon and Marsh.

"As one of us said, and I won't tell you which one said it, it is exciting and slightly scary," said Mr. Lee-Emery. "It is exciting to own a piece of the business."

The principals are also changing the name of the company and are currently running through the incorporation process and will announce the new name by the end of the month.

Sinser Insurance Company has about 14 staff at its Church Street offices, about 50 percent of whom are Bermudian, who will all keep their jobs.

Mr. Dove said while Sinser had been on the Island since 1979, Skandia had decided that Sinser was no longer a core business of theirs and so sold their operations to Aon.

He added: "We felt that this was the best direction for both our clients, our staff and ourselves. Our operation is independent in the brokerage community and our clients have come to us for that reason. And that was their preference.

"For ourselves, the difference to a large brokering organisation is their marketing capabilities, they have offices all over the world bringing in business and we rely very much on a network of clients and contacts that we have built up over the last 30 years. In terms of services the clients receive, the core services we provide won't change."

Mr. Lee-Emery said they work with regional brokers in the US who were not happy about the prospect of working with a large brokerage firm, and the only solution was to go it alone. He added: "Those people are not keen to work with large brokerage operations such as the ones which we are no longer part of, because they are competitors of theirs. So there was a conflict there.

"Essentially much of our business has come from those sources, and a number of those people were obviously uncomfortable with the position we found ourselves in in August.

"We have a responsibility to those people and our clients to keep them the way they are used to. And the only way to do that was to keep our book of business separate to any Aon connection and the only way that was going to work was to create a company. The company had to stop being part of the Aon group in order to preserve the relationships with the clients and the producers that were already in existence. And we were luck enough to have the opportunity to do that."