approve the move to Bermuda by Electric Mutual Liability Insurance Company (EMLICO) will now be the subject of oversight hearings in the Massachusetts Senate this month.

Chairman of the Massachusetts legislature's joint committee on insurance, Senator Dianne Wilkerson, has advised that the purpose of these hearings, under the aegis of the senate committee on insurance, is to investigate the administration of various Massachusetts general laws.

The committee will use a review of statutes to probe contentious issues. One issue they are interested in involves EMLICO.

Senate papers indicate an interest by the committee on how the statutory framework was used in relation to the process in which EMLICO left Massachusetts for Bermuda.

The EMLICO matter is the last on the agenda, scheduled for October 30. It is just one of several issues that have arisen out of decisions made by the Division of Insurance that haunt its commissioner, Linda Ruthardt.

Senator Wilkerson's responsibilities include overseeing the division. Her committee will determine if Commissioner Ruthardt was circumspect in the decision to allow EMLICO's move, especially after the insurer claimed insolvency just months after the re-domestication.

Reinsurers, some of whom are from Massachusetts, have claimed that EMLICO and principal creditor, General Electric, hatched a plot to declare insolvency in Bermuda to get reinsurers to pay for more of the $500 million in environmental liability claims.

They argue that EMLICO and GE knew that its reinsurers would not be responsible for paying hundreds of millions of dollars in claims if the insolvency had occurred in Massachusetts.

They have accused the companies of conspiracy to defraud and their allegations are not falling on deaf ears.

The US attorney's office has already issued subpoenas to a number of related parties, including EMLICO's reinsurers.

They want to know more about a leaked memorandum from the London law office of Clifford Chance, which showed the company's counsel was aware of the substantial financial difference to GE, depending on whether a liquidation occurred in Massachusetts or Bermuda.

Commissioner Ruthardt is already acting on a July decision to revisit the matter. Back in July, she declined to re-open the re-domestication issue, but resolved to probe related issues involving Electric Insurance Company (EIC).

Last month, days after the move by the US Attorney's office, she formally required key players in the matter to report to her office by last Monday with documents relating to the case.

When EMLICO made its move to Bermuda in July 1995, it split off its good business to EIC.

Her decision to leave EMLICO alone was premised on court action underway in Bermuda, and an acceptance that EMLICO was now a Bermuda company which was under a winding up order in the Bermuda courts.

She determined that she need not resolve the question of her authority to proceed at that time with a reopening of the re-domestication regardless of the Bermuda domicile.

She wrote: "Being respectful of the authority of other regulators and noting the imminence of the Bermuda hearing, I decline as a matter of discretion, to re-open the re-domestication proceeding at this time.'' That decision came two months after she, not surprisingly, got nowhere by trying to encourage Bermudian authorities to delay the hearing of the winding up petition, while she conducted a review.