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Some people like to tour historic sites. Others like to spend their vacations enjoying nature's beauty. David Schiff apparently likes to spend his visiting insurance companies.
The 41-year-old Schiff is owner and editor of Schiff's Insurance Observer, s bimonthly industry newsletter. Schiff's October issue takes Des Moines' Allied Insurance Group -- and its former CEO, John Evans -- to task for what he calls conflicts of interest between Allied's mutual insurance company and its separate shareholder-owned insurance company.
Schiff charges that the mutual company's policyholders were not properly served by Evans and other Allied executives because they favored the shareholder company over the mutual.
Because Evans owns a large portion of Allied Group's stock, Schiff charges, he bolstered that company at the expense of Allied Mutual, which is owned by its policyholders. Evans was CEO of both companies simultaneously, and chairman of both Allied Mutual and Allied Group's boards of directors.
"If you are a fiduciary, you are sup. posed to act in the best interests of the group of people for whom you are a fiduciary," Schiff says. The executives "were fiduciaries for Allied Mutual policyholders, and somehow they managed to make a fortune, and the people they were supposed to look out for missed out on a fortune. I think it's shocking and appalling."
A YANKEE IN IOWA
Schiff says he's not an insurance critic. More like an insurance junkie. He first heard rumblings of what was going on at Allied Mutual, he says, on a vacation trip through Iowa.
"I'd never been to Iowa, so...