Captain's Quarters: You Knew Darned Well I Was A Snake Before You Took Me In

re: From Captain Ed, "I often think about the wisdom contained in the classic, "The Snake", about the fatal naiveté of a woman who succoured a snake back to health, only to receive a fatal bite in the end. That parable struck me when I read this story about Lloyds of London balking at paying a £30 million reinsurance judgment to North Korea after agreeing to underwrite under the terms of North Korean law...[snip]...A few weeks ago, I blogged on the scam that Kim Jong-Il was running on insurers in order to gain hard currency, now that the US has shut down their counterfeiting fence. Kim has raked in over $150 million already in insurance fraud, primarily life insurance, because he has control of all of the official agencies that would substantiate any claims. At the time, I warned that the reinsurance market would bear the brunt of Kim's fraud and suggested that they declare any claim without independent verification as baseless./And that's exactly what Lloyd's intends to do, but unfortunately, their contract forces them to accept North Korean courts as the authority having jurisdiction for any dispute. Why they accepted these terms is a question they have yet to answer, but the fact is that they did, and they have been accepting the premiums for nine years on this policy..."...