Insurance Fraud - Multiple Policies

A man has been charged with insurance fraud after trying to claim over £1million for a double amputation caused by alleged self-inflicted frostbite. Investigators accused the man, identified only by his surname Chang, of deliberately immersing his legs in a bucket filled with dry ice for 10 hours in order to claim money from insurers when his limbs were amputated for frostbite last February.

Multiple Policies -The 24-year-old suspect claimed he suffered the injuries after riding his scooter on a cold evening in northern Taiwan, suffering blistering injuries as a result. But Taiwan's Criminal Investigation Bureau (CIB) said investigators were alerted when insurers flagged suspicious claims, and found he had taken out several high-payout packages just days before the alleged scooter trip.

The CIB noted in their report that 'Taiwan is a subtropical region' and there are, as a result, 'no known cases of serious frostbite requiring amputation due to natural climate factors in the flatlands'.

Legs Amputated - Chang, a student, underwent emergency surgery in February last year and both legs were amputated below the knee due to fourth-degree frostbite, sepsis and bone necrosis.

Prosecutors said Chang then spent around 10 hours with his legs immersed in the dry ice. Chang was allegedly helped by an accomplice named as Liao, 24. Liao allegedly helped Chang to fill a plastic bucket with dry ice before strapping him into a chair with cable ties.

Liao documented the stunt between 2am and noon on 27 January 2023, according to the prosecutor's statement on March 14. Direct contact with dry ice, a solid form of carbon dioxide with a surface temperature of -78.5C, can quickly damage skin cells and lead to frostbite.

The two suspects successfully were able to claim the equivalent of £5,489 (USD 7,000) from one insurance firm a month after Chang lost his lower legs. Four other companies refused to pay out the rest of his eight disability claims. All five firms reported his suspicious insurance claims to the authorities. In total, the claims reportedly totaled around £1million (USD 1.3 million). Chang and Liao, who went to high school together, have been charged with insurance fraud and attempted insurance fraud as the case continues.

Reporting on their investigation, the CIB presented weather reports that showed the temperatures on the day in question were between 6.1C and 17C, too mild to cause serious frostbite. The agency said Chang's injuries showed he wasn't wearing shoes or socks at the time of his injuries, concluding that they were therefore 'man-made'.

Following a raid on his home in November last year, the police found the bucket he allegedly used along with a polystyrene box that held the dry ice.

Hertz U-turn on Electric Vehicles

Hertz Global Holdings is replacing its chief executive officer in the wake of a disastrous bet on electric vehicles that the company began unwinding in recent months.

Stephen Scherr - who ran Hertz for just over two years after three decades at Goldman Sachs Group has decided to step down. Scherr, 59, joined Hertz several months after it emerged from bankruptcy and started making splashy wagers on electric vehicles. Under new owners Knighthead Capital Management and Certares Management, the rental company announced plans to order 100,000 vehicles from Tesla, sending the automaker’s market capitalization soaring past the $1 trillion mark at the time. Hertz doubled down on EVs in the months after Scherr took over, placing big orders with Polestar and GM. The company ended up buying a small number of cars from the two companies.

Strategy Backfire - Those bets went awry last year, when Tesla slashed prices across its lineup to keep growing vehicle sales. This hammered the resale value of used Model 3 sedans and Model Y crossovers just after Hertz had added ten of thousands of those vehicles to its fleet.

By December, Hertz started selling off 20,000 electric vehicles, or about a third of its EV fleet. Germany’s Sixt SE, a leading car-renter in Europe — is taking even more drastic measures, phasing Teslas out of its fleet entirely.

Hertz announced its EV sell-down plans in January, citing lackluster demand, costly depreciation and expensive repairs. The Estero, Florida-based company took a $245 million charge and reported its biggest quarterly loss since the pandemic. 

Shares of Hertz fell 2% after regular trading in New York Friday.

Insurer Rejected Claim Under Accident Policy

A widow who sought accidental death benefits from the company that insured her late husband was awarded more time by the court to press her claim. 

Insurance Claim Rejected - Mr Teng Boon Thye, 58, had died after riding his bicycle into a drain in 2021. However, Chubb Insurance Singapore disputed the claims of about S$406,000 (US$305,000) from the two policies her late husband was insured under.

Madam Lee Hui Chin, 60, submitted claims to the insurer, but the company obtained a report listing causes of death that it used to reject the claims, saying the man had died from sickness, which was not covered under the policies.

Mdm Lee's daughter, Ms Rachel Teng, consulted lawyers and later filed notices of arbitration with the Singapore International Arbitration Centre (SIAC) over the two polices. But the insurer made further objections including that Ms Teng was not the policy holder and could not commence arbitration proceedings. Mdm Lee, who holds the policies for her husband, applied to the High Court under the Arbitration Act to extend the time fixed to refer disputes to arbitration.

Death Cause By Natural or Accident Causes - Mr Teng fell while riding his bicycle on Apr 2, 2021 and was found unconscious in an uncovered drain. He was taken to Ng Teng Fong General Hospital and did not regain consciousness. He was removed from life support a week later and died.

According to his daughter, 25-year-old Ms Teng, the treating doctors at the hospital had said Mr Teng died as a consequence of the injuries sustained in the accident. An MRI scan on Apr 4, 2021 showed a spinal cord injury and the MRI report also referenced changes in Mr Teng's lungs, chest fractures and cardiac arrest.

In a death certificate issued on Apr 10, 2021, the forensic pathologist certified the cause of death as "coronary artery disease with pneumonia". The State Coroner also issued a certificate stating that it was unnecessary to hold an inquiry as the cause of death was due to natural causes. No autopsy was performed as a result.

Chubb Insurance Singapore - Mdm Lee held two insurance polices with Chubb Insurance Singapore insuring her husband. The policies provided for accidental death benefits, payable in the event that death occurs as a result of an accidental injury, Justice Chua said in his grounds of decision.

The policies also provided that any dispute must be referred to arbitration, and that this must be commenced three months from the day parties were unable to settle the dispute. On Apr 20, 2021, Mdm Lee submitted claims to Chubb Insurance Singapore under the two policies.

The insurer obtained a report from Ng Teng Fong General Hospital in which the attending physician stated that the primary cause of death was likely cervical spine injury leading to cardiac arrest.

The report also stated that while the coroner had reported coronary artery disease with pneumonia, there was no evidence of acute myocardial infarct - the medical term for a heart attack - on initial presentation.

Chubb Rejected Claim - On Aug 19, 2021, the insurer rejected Mdm Lee's claims on the ground that the cause of Mr Teng's death was due to sickness - coronary artery disease with pneumonia. This was not covered under the policies.

Ms Teng consulted lawyers and obtained a further medical report from a neurologist, who stated among other things that there was no evidence Mr Teng had died of coronary artery disease. The neurologist noted that no autopsy had been performed.

Arbitration - were granted to Ms Teng to be the administrator of her father's estate in July 2022. On Aug 26, 2022, lawyers for Mr Teng's estate wrote to the insurer enclosing a copy of the neurologist's report.

The insurance company took time to review the claims and agreed to extend the time bar for commencement of arbitration until end-June 2023. However, Chubb Insurance Singapore confirmed its previous position on Dec 30, 2022 that the claims were not covered by the two policies.

Ms Teng then filed two notices of arbitration with SIAC in February 2023. In the insurance company's responses, it noted that Ms Teng could not commence arbitration proceedings against it as she was not the policy holder. The insurer asked for a dismissal of the proceedings, and the arbitrator allowed it.

Mdm Lee then filed an application to the High Court in September 2023 asking for time to be extended for her to commence arbitration against Chubb Insurance Singapore.

Justice Chua granted her application, saying this was not a case where she had "sat idly by".

"Arbitration was commenced well before the expiry of the extended time bar of Jun 30, 2023," he said. "The problem was that the arbitration notices were issued in Ms Teng's name instead of (Mdm Lee's)."

He noted also that Mdm Lee had acted quickly in filing the application. The amount involved was also significant, with the value of the claims under the policies amounting to S$406,000.

Great Eastern Agent - 30 Months Jail Term

To gamble online on unlicensed gambling websites and cover his personal expenses, an insurance agent cheated his friend’s family of S$309,820 (RM1.09 million). Tan Wei Chong, 36, pocketed the money they had paid for both genuine policies offered by insurance agency Great Eastern and fictitious policies that he had invented.

Tan never made restitution to the victims, though Great Eastern fully reimbursed them for their losses some time later on Aug 27, 2021. Today, Tan was sentenced to 30 months’ jail, backdated to June 12 last year when he was put in remand

Tan was a financial consultant for Great Eastern when his friend, Mr Cher Chee Wee, introduced his family to Tan. The pair had known each other since secondary school. Mr Cher and his father, mother and sister purchased more than one insurance policy each from Tan. Court documents did not state the ages of Mr Cher and his father.

On Sept 22 in 2017, Tan met Mr Cher’s mother, Liu Swee Khim, now 71, and recommended that she get a Great Eastern insurance policy. Liu trusted Tan since he was her son’s friend, and decided to invest S$100,000 in the policy through Tan. Liu then asked her daughter, Ms Jeslyn Cher, now 38, to give a cheque of S$100,000 to Tan, which she did.

When the cheque bounced, Tan asked Ms Cher to reissue another cheque. This time, he told her to leave the payee name unwritten and he would help her to fill it in. However, instead of addressing the cheque to Great Eastern, Tan wrote the name of a company for which his father is a director. He would then transfer the money in smaller transactions from the company bank account to his own bank account.

On Oct 16 in 2019, Tan called up Liu to sell her another insurance policy — this time, the policy was fictitious. He told her that there was an ongoing promotion for this policy and she decided to invest S$120,000. Liu again asked Ms Cher to issue a cheque with the payee name column left blank, and Tan deposited the cheque into his father’s company bank account.

The next day, Tan called Liu to tell her that he could not meet his sales target for the month. He asked if she could invest an extra S$30,000 into the fake policy and Liu complied. Tan was given a S$30,000 cheque by Ms Cher, which he deposited into his father’s company account on Oct 22, 2019.

Tan repeated the ruse again sometime around March 12 in 2020, where he told Liu that he could not hit his sales target and asked her to buy a S$20,000 policy. She agreed but transferred the money directly to Tan’s personal bank account this time.

In total, Tan received S$309,820 from Liu and Ms Cher. He used the money to feed his gambling addiction and to cover his personal expenses. When the fictitious policy was due to mature on Sept 9 in 2020, Liu called Tan because she had not received any payout or notification from Great Eastern.

To stave off further questions, Tan forged a letter from Great Eastern in October 2020 stating that there “were unintentional errors in the payment process that resulted in a delay in the payment” and sent the letter to her home.

Leadership Applying Lateral Thinking

Creativity has always been a highly sought after skill both on the personal and professional side of life. In the business world, it means thinking up exciting ideas to tackle complex and ever-changing situations. It’s the foundation of lateral thinking.

The most innovative companies in the world stand out for their commitment to lateral thinking. Breaking the mold of what’s normal or expected means the possibilities are endless and the benefits can show in ways you least expect.

There are 5 steps to help you best utilize lateral thinking in your company. This guide will help you get the most out of your teams’ skills and push the whole company forward.

Open Your Mind - Seek new ideas, get out of our comfort zone, and change our perspectives. This allows us to put aside any preexisting stereotypes or traditional concepts in our collective imagination. Through this process, we can change our perceptions to develop new ideas that may have been glossed over or ignored with vertical or logical thinking.

Opening our minds allows us to unleash a multitude of possibilities and create a new framework that incorporates the new ideas put forward. The imagination is both endless and collective in the workplace, and all members work together to understand, analyze, and accept new creative limits.

A practical example of expanding the limits of the mind is to ask yourself “why?” repeatedly until you get a better picture of the alternatives and underlying intentions of any particular action. By posing this question several times to an action or situation, we can find creative and productive misgivings that may lead us to rethink the norms we’ve become accustomed to, even on the granular level.

Promote Creativity - After broadening mental horizons in the office, it’s important to nurture the flow of creative ideas. Creativity and simplification complement each other enormously. We must find new, alternative ways of doing things. However, not just any idea, just for being simple and different, will be effective. Good ideas need to add value and promote successful business proposals.

Visual responses can be a good creative stimuli. For example, a photograph allows us to practice creative interpretation. However, we don’t just interpret our acquired knowledge, we also combine it, reapply it to other contexts, and even develop alternatives to what we previously knew.

A photo of a product can produce a wide array of emotions and ideas –from the obvious to the abstract:

 - A description of how things are represented.
 - An explanation of what we see in the image.
 - A projection of what the product will look like in the future.
- Imaginative alternatives as diverse as the user’s imagination allows.

Get Ahead Of The Problem - Human beings in general often have a tendency to be reactive, not proactive creatures, waiting for a situation to worsen before deciding to act. Yet, lateral thinking promotes proactivity and boldness to suggest and commit to ideas without fear of failing. The truth is that not all ideas are going to be a hit, but that shouldn’t hinder creativity. The idea is to create an environment that nurtures innovation, in whatever form it takes, and go from there.

There can be multiple solutions to any one problem. For example, most problems require a solution that falls into one or more of these general categories:

 - Overcome whatever obstacle you’re facing.
 - Plan better or create something new altogether.
 - Find and get rid of a specific problem point.

Any combination of these three general approaches to problems can be applied in the early stages of developing a value proposition or any other such project. In doing so, not only do we give ourselves the possibility to consider other alternatives, but we can also forecast possible changes or complications that may arise.

In some proposals, these three general solutions may still be unsatisfactory, in which case they should be expanded and further hashed out. Nonetheless, this process helps us take a step back and analyze what we have in front of us. It generates conversation and feedback without having to wait for a problem to get out of hand first.

Put It Up To Chance - Once we’ve stepped out of our comfort zone, and our creativity is flowing, it’s important to let chance step in. Sometimes things that are out of our control affect us more than we’d like to admit. Stimulating lateral thinking, and taking seemingly unrelated elements into consideration, allows us to play two random concepts off each other and open up new ways of thinking.

An interesting exercise for this is to choose a random word (from a dictionary, for example) and see how that word would affect the idea at hand. It’s a good way to see how unforeseen circumstances will affect the fate of an idea. You can overcome the limitations of logical thinking by throwing a wrench into the plan and seeing how it stands up to it. This rethinking prevents traditional thinking and parameters from limiting your scope, no matter how unlikely such situations may be.

Apply Logic In Reverse - Vertical thinking is the sworn enemy of lateral thinking. The former limits itself to “common sense” and other traditional frameworks we’re used to. Lateral thinking, however, allows us to consider a wider range of possibilities and solutions that may not have been looked at before. It allows us to think up abstract and backward scenarios that don’t follow traditional logic and dream up solutions never thought of before.

For example, a door company might consider multiple possibilities moving forward:

 - Doors that aren’t rectangular.
 - Reverse hinges.
 - Opening with facial recognition.
 - Complete uniformity of designs.

Some assumptions may seem simple or obvious but that doesn’t matter. Let the ideas flow freely, and the assumptions be turned on their head.In short, this guide serves as a basis for applying lateral thinking in business, which will turn your office into a more open, innovative, and conscious place.

Getting out of your comfort zone and embracing new value propositions is the key to company survival in a business environment where the only constant is change. Make the shift towards lateral thinking in your company and the results will surprise you.

HSBC Issued $250 Million Life Insurance Policy

Issued and fully underwritten by HSBC Life, the firm’s insurance arm based in Hong Kong, this monumental policy underscores HSBC’s prowess in the insurance sector and its ability to cater to the evolving needs of affluent individuals.

Structured as a whole-of-life protection plan, the policy promises to pay out a substantial $250 million to the named beneficiary of the insured individual upon their demise. With features meticulously crafted to safeguard the insured’s wealth for future generations, this policy stands as a testament to HSBC’s commitment to providing comprehensive and tailored insurance solutions.

In the past year alone, HSBC Life has issued an impressive ten life insurance policies valued at $50m or higher to individual clients, reflecting the company’s strong foothold in the high-value insurance market.

In 2014, the previous Guinness World Record was set for a life insurance policy valued at $201m, certified in California, United States.

Malaysian - Inadequate Savings

A significant number of Malaysians do not have enough savings for their retirement, with only 33% of active Employee Provident Fund (EPF) members having recorded basic savings of RM240,000 as of last year. This percentage represented 2.4 million members aged between 18 and 55 in the formal sector.

However, this was an improvement from the 31% in 2021 and 30% in 2022 – which were due to withdrawal facilities for EPF members during Covid-19 lockdowns – but still a plunge from 37% in 2020.

As at December last year, there were 16.07 million EPF members. 8.52 million were active members, representing 50% of Malaysia’s 17.03-million-strong labor force.

Target Amount At Age 55 - Basic savings is a pre-determined amount set according to age in Account 1 under EPF to enable members to achieve a minimum savings of RM240,000 by the age of 55. Current data showed that the number of people aged between 41 and 50 who had achieved their basic savings was higher than those aged between 51 and 55, who are closer to retirement age. 

All this data is telling me that a large portion of the population has inadequate savings for retirement. 75% of members who had retired and taken out their savings in a lump sum ran out of money within five years.

Beyond Formal Employment - Rapid transformation of the working landscape, with more people shifting beyond formal employment, as one of the challenges, referring to a rise in gig workers and self-employment due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Malaysia anticipates an increase in different types of jobs going beyond formal employment, including gig jobs, remote working, and independent contractors. While this group of people would generate relatively higher income, they would not have old-age protection as they are not covered by any social security.

Research showing that by 2040, 33% of employment in Malaysia was projected to be in the informal category. This would lead to lower likelihood of old-age income security and financial resilience upon retirement while at the same time, lowering the active formal membership base at EPF.