The entertainment insurance broker that has arranged cover for the likes of Michael Jackson, Queen and Cliff Richard has been sold to a US rival.
Robertson Taylor and its sister firms within Entertainment Insurance Partners (EIP) found protection for 14 of the top 20 grossing tours worldwide last year, the company said as it unveiled its sale to the US firm Integro.
As well as the world’s biggest bands, its customers have included the Brit Awards, the British Olympic Association and a string of films and TV programmes. The company helped the Foo Fighters with the cost of cancelling their European tour after frontman Dave Grohl broke his leg this summer.
About half of the company’s revenues come from the US and Canada, while the UK generated £6.3m of its £17m revenues last year. It has offices in London, New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta and Nashville.
EIP will now be absorbed into Integro Insurance Brokers, a New York-based competitor, in a deal worth an undisclosed sum. The management team at EIP, led by chief executive John Silcock, will move with the company to its new owners.
“The entertainment and sport business is a global business,” said Mr Silcock. “Together, EIP and Integro will become a combined force with unrivalled expertise, client and carrier relationships.”
Robertson Taylor was founded in 1977 after a group of insurance brokers tapped into demand to cover bands’ instruments. According to a Billboard article that commemorated the firm’s 25th anniversary, the company was born after a request from Willie Robertson’s old Harrovian schoolmate to protect equipment for King Crimon and Emerson, Lake and Palmer.
“My pin-striped suits and accents didn’t make me an automatic mate of the [band] managers; it took me a long period of late, drunken nights to be accepted,” said Mr Robertson, who died in 2011, the same year the company was sold to the investment company Rivertrade.
One of Robertson Taylor’s biggest policies covered Michael Jackson’s sold-out stint at the O2, described as “the greatest concert that no one got a chance to see” after the singer’s death shortly before the residency began in 2009.
Other unusual policies arranged by the firm’s founders include cover for Pink Floyd’s Battersea power station photoshoot, which ended up with one of the helium-filled inflatable pigs breaking loose and drifting over Kent.
Rivertrade, owned by former Man Group director John Kinder, has acquired a number of entertainment insurers since 2000 and rolled them into Entertainment Insurance Partners. The firm did not respond to a request for comment on the sale.
SOURCE: Telegraph
