Bernd Michaels

Bernd Michaels (born February 1, 1936 in Hamburg ; † December 23, 2019 ) was a German insurance manager. He was chairman of the board of the Deutsche Herold insurance group and then of the Provinzial Rheinland . He was also head of the Association of Public Insurers and, between 1993 and 2003, President of the Association of the German Insurance Industry .

Career

The son of a Hamburg trading family studied law in Freiburg (Breisgau) , where he passed the first state examination in 1960. He then returned to Hamburg, where he temporarily worked for Deutsche Rück during his traineeship and passed the second state examination in law in 1965. He then stayed with Reimer Schmidt at the department of civil and insurance law at the University of Hamburg, where he in 1967 with a dissertation on a comparison of the supervisory practices of insurance companies and banks doctorate .

After two years at VGH Insurance , Michaels moved to AachenMünchener in 1969 , where he was initially appointed director in 1971 and appointed to the board in 1972. At the Aachen-based insurer, his departmental responsibilities changed over the years, from 1975 he was responsible for liability and accident insurance and from 1976 for the entire HUK area. In 1982, he moved to Bonn as CEO of the German Herold, who was then in turmoil. In November 1983 he left the company and moved to the board of the Provinzial Rheinland as a member responsible for property insurance . Initially deputy chairman of the board, he moved up to chairman of the board in 1985. He headed the insurance group until 2001, among other things he accompanied the implementation of the new statutes in 1997 with the restructuring of the insurance company's guarantors .

After Michaels had accompanied the reorganization of insurance supervision and contract law in the course of Europeanization for many years, especially through specialist publications, he became spokesman for the associations of public insurers in 1990. At the end of 1992 he stepped down when he succeeded Georg Büchner as the eleventh president of the Association of the German Insurance Industry in April 1993, but remained a member of the administrative board of the Association of Public Insurers until 2001. During his term of office, the industry was deregulated in 1994 and the association's headquarters were relocated to Berlin. At the end of the 1990s he appeared in the political discussions about the realignment of private old-age provision in the course of the Riester reforms , when he argued against the taxation of endowment insurance in particular with politicians. At the same time, he initiated the Insurance Ombudsman Association through the GDV , which started its work in September 2001 as an arbitration body for insurance matters. In 2001, the association changed its statutes, according to which Michaels, who had already resigned from his office at Provinzial Rheinland, would have had to resign from the GDV chairmanship so that he could shape the fate of the association until 2003. In this extension of the term of office in 2002 was the first major capital market crisis, especially the life insurance companies with high equity exposure in the predicament brought and in the GDV, the protector Life Insurance Company initiated a special rescue company.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d e} versicherungswirtschaft-heute.de: "Former GDV President Dr. Bernd Michaels has passed away "
2. ↑ voev.de: “Dr. Bernd Michaels has died "
3. ↑ ^{a b} boersen-zeitung.de: "Bernd Michaels"