Some 28 percent of the corporate money in Lloyd's for the 1999 underwriting year is from Bermuda companies, Lloyd's deputy chairman, Elvin Patrick has disclosed.

"That's from nowhere, five or six years ago,'' he emphasised.

Addressing the 12th International Reinsurance Congress at the Princess Hotel which ended on Friday, he said 35 percent will come from UK companies, while 32 percent will come from US companies.

In total, 72 percent of Lloyd's capacity for next year will be corporate, with 430 companies supplying the capital, a significant jump since corporate money first arrived at Lloyd's in 1994.

But the largest managing agent still controls less than ten percent of the 10 billion of premium capacity.

More than half of Lloyd's business is coming from brokers, who are now applying leverage in the face of pressure on their transactional fees.

Some, he said, are making the point to Lloyd's: "If you don't give us more of your reinsurance and more brokerage, we'll stop supplying you business altogether. You'll find that the underwriting markets in London will respond with some vigour.'' He estimated that losses connected to Hurricane Georges will be quickly settled within six months, because far fewer individual markets are on the hook for the losses, than for insured events of the past.

"It is heavily retained.'' Mr. Patrick noted. "The insured loss in the bottom right hand corner of America, that part which is not in the flood programme, will be at least 50 percent retained by the big companies which are simply not reinsured.

"The remaining half will go to primary reinsurers. A good chunk of it will go into Lloyd's, a fair bit into London companies. But apart from one more reinsurance step, which you can call primary retro, it will then stop, because the multiplicity of reinsurance spiral deals (of the past) no longer exist.'' In observing industry trends, Mr. Patrick said, "There's been in the insurance and broking markets in the last 18 months consolidations to $160 billion, which is five times as much as the last five years put together. That is the accelerating pace of consolidation.'' He noted that in a market of soft pricing and heavy competition, facultative property rates are one tenth of what they were four years ago. Marine rates are about a third and catastrophe rates are about a quarter.

Yet some market players are happy, in the absence of poor underwriting profitability, to be making investment gains.

He observed rhetorically, "The combined ratio, the technical result, has completely passed the noses of the management on the grounds that it really doesn't matter.'' A shrinking market of premiums with fewer, larger players has meant companies either poach business, or buy other companies and improve their distribution.

There are significant losses this year -- from ice storm and windstorm catastrophes, typhoons in India and Japan, and a gas explosion in Australia which will be well over a billion dollars.

Mr. Patrick's remarks contained assurances that Lloyd's was changed for the better and had the strength, professionalism and security it was known for before the hard times of the 1980s.

There are 150 large syndicates at Lloyd's today, compared to 400 smaller ones ten years ago. There were many small players, a subscription business with 20 to 50 markets on each risk and a multiplex of reinsurance retrocessional arrangements, with colossal transactions taking place every time there was a loss.

He said, "What you had was a multiplicity of small players, heavily London-oriented, heavily spiral-dominated, and heavy with reinsurance upon reinsurance and multi-layers of reinsurance arrangements.

"Previous to that, there had always been a sucker market for reinsurance. At one stage it was Japan. The international reinsurance brokers took them to pieces and they quit. Then we had some North American players who were mauled by the brokers and they quit.

"Then we had the Bermudian captives who were desperate to write third party non-related business. And they got taken to pieces by the international brokers.

"They didn't quit. A lot of them simply went out of business. They were some very big captives with billions of dollars of losses.''