BRUSSELS – Tommy Persson, until recently chief executive of Sweden’s Länsförsäkringar insurance group, has been elected president of the CEA, the umbrella group for Europe’s national insurance industry trade associations. Persson was elected at the CEA’s general assembly in Berlin in June and will take over from Gérard de la Martinière who has completed a four-year term as CEA president.

WASHINGTON – Top US central banker Donald Kohn stressed to US lawmakers in early June the importance of the so-called pillar 2 supervisory overview aspects of the Basel II bank safety rules as a counterweight to any deficiencies in risk modelling under the new capital framework.

– The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) is seeking a new general manager to replace Malcolm Knight when he leaves at the end of September. Knight, who has been BIS general manager and chief executive officer since April 2003, is accepting an appointment as non-executive vice chairman of Deutsche Bank Group, with responsibility for co-ordinating group-wide issues on regulation, supervision and financial stability for Deutsche’s management board. He has also accepted a post as visiting professor in finance at the London School of Economics.

“It now looks unlikely that the situation in the financial services industry may have implications upon the real economy,” Bank of Italy Governor Mario Draghi, the head of the Financial Stability Forum (FSF), told journalists according to news agency reports from Osaka on the meeting there of finance ministers of the Group of Eight industrial countries.

SSELS – International regulators must conduct a new impact study followed by a deeper macroeconomic analysis to gauge the effects of the recent financial market turmoil on the Basel II bank safety framework, a leading European think tank says.

LONDON – The credit crunch underscores the need to think about the consequences of moving insurance contracts to a full “fair value” model based on estimated prices that would be available in a market, credit rating agency Fitch Ratings says in a late May report.

PARIS – Accounting standards crafted in the interest of investors are the key to ensuring International Financial Reporting Standards, (IFRS), fulfill the promise of uniting the world’s capital markets and of being a powerful tool for investors everywhere, America’s top stock market regulator said in June. Above all, a public company’s financial reports represent a direct communication between the company and its investors, US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) chairman Christopher Cox said. As SEC chief, Cox heads the federal agency that regulates US stock markets.

Despite the critics, regulators are generally backing the principle of fair value as they get down to improving the way it works when markets seize up reports David Keefe

The IASB’s expert advisory panel is looking at the following questions in respect of valuing financial products when markets are no longer active:

A “coalition of the non-willing” is allied against Solvency II’s group supervision proposals. Search for compromise starts By David Keefe