apart at the seams'', a Miami-based offshore newsletter has alleged.

And the report in yesterday's edition of controversial publication Inside Bermuda detailed another legal claim -- this one for $2.5 million -- against one of the company's UK subsidiaries by the liquidator of an insolvent insurer.

But Wall Street lawyer Richard Brown, Stirling Cooke's outside counsel, told The Royal Gazette last night the report was a "beat up''.

The report claimed May was "another bad month'' for the company which "suffered the resignation of a director, announced that it had become involved in yet another arbitration in London'' and unveiled poor earnings.

It claimed Stirling Cooke gave no reason for the resignation of director Warren Cabral last month and accused the company of hiding behind the tried and tested plea that "he did not resign because of any disagreement''.

But lawyer Mr. Brown said Mr. Cabral's reasons for resigning were given clearly in the 10K form the company lodged with the SEC.

"The company explained that he serves on quite a number of boards and he was reducing his workload,'' Mr. Brown said.

"He resigned from a number of boards including boards of public companies and he continues to represent the company, most recently last Thursday at the AGM in Bermuda. There's no news behind the resignation.

"With the exception of the arbitration in London this is all information that has been publicly reported before and it is worth noting that most of his suggested secret sources appear simply to be the company's SEC filings.

"The journalist tries to make it sound like it's all I-spy stuff, but it's not.'' The lawyer said the only news at the company was that shareholders re-elected all of the directors at Stirling Cooke at the AGM on May 27, appointed a new outside director and confirmed Arthur Andersen as auditor.

Previous outside auditor KPMG Peat Marwick resigned in April.

But Mr. Brown made no comment on the claim in the report that Goldman Sachs, which owns almost a quarter of Stirling Cooke, met with the company's senior management last month to discuss the "company's plight''.

The report quotes documents which Stirling Cooke filed with the SEC regarding the most recent arbitration filed against it by liquidators of an insolvent insurance company.

The filing said the liquidator claims the insurer is owed $2.5 million for reinsurance premiums for business that Stirling Cooke's subsidiary was meant to, but failed to, reinsure with the insurer.

Stirling Cooke went on to say its subsidiary was "in the process of preparing a response'' but management believed the claim was "without merit'' and intended to "vigorously defend against it''.

The company stressed the case was unrelated to the several others it is fighting which were kicked off in the UK last year over business brokered and underwritten by Stirling Cooke entities.

Yesterday's report said there were seven lawsuits filed in the UK last year against Stirling Cooke alleging "fraud, conspiracy to defraud, misrepresentation and negligence''.