The story
Founded by Alessandro Daninos on May 9, 1838, in Trieste.1
Foundation and Habsburg period
Riunione Adriatica di Sicurtà was established on 9 May 1838 by the Adriatico Banco d'Assicurazione, a marine and credit insurer set up in Trieste in 1826. Trieste was then a major seaport and already had more than twenty insurance companies. The new company was meant to extend fire and cargo insurance from Trieste to the rest of the Austrian Empire and abroad, and it started with a share capital of 1.5 million florins. Its founders included Angelo Giannichesi, of Greek origin, who was managing director for more than twenty years, and the German baron Herman Lutteroth.
Within months the company opened agencies in several European cities, among them Athens, Budapest, Prague and Berlin, and by 1844 it was also present in Warsaw and Hamburg. It introduced hail insurance in Bohemia in 1853 and life insurance in 1854. In 1862 it absorbed its former parent company. A survey published for the 1873 Vienna World's Fair ranked it second among the 33 insurers operating in Austria-Hungary. By its fortieth anniversary in 1878, annual premiums had grown from 120,000 florins in the first year to more than 9 million, and the company had 296 employees and more than 4,000 sub-agencies.
The company followed the unification of Italy. Its head office for the Kingdom of Italy moved to Florence in 1865 and to Rome in 1871. In 1898, when accident insurance became compulsory for many Italian industries, RAS set up L'Assicuratrice Italiana in Milan for accident and liability business, and in 1911 it founded La Protectrice in Paris. In the first decade of the 20th century the separate Italian general agencies were merged into a single directorate for Italy, based in Milan.
When Italy entered the First World War in 1915, the Austrian authorities moved the general directorate to Vienna. In Italy, where RAS was still an Austrian company, a government decree placed it under state supervision from August 1916 to September 1917. Some of its Italian managers asked for the measure to be lifted, arguing that the share capital was by then in Italian hands. After Trieste passed to Italy in 1918, the company adopted a new charter, converted its capital into lire and created the office of president. The first holder was Scipione de Sandrinelli, a former mayor of Trieste.
Interwar period and Second World War
Arnoldo Frigessi di Rattalma, whose father had been the company's general manager, joined RAS in 1902. He succeeded his father as general manager in 1917 and became president in 1933. After the war he rebuilt the business in Austria and in the other states that had been part of the Habsburg monarchy. According to the Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, in little more than a decade the group's staff grew from 10,000 to 30,000 and the number of its affiliated companies reached 25, on three continents. In 1928 RAS opened representative offices in Asia and North Africa, and in 1929 a directorate in Brazil.
In 1934 the block of RAS shares held by Credito Italiano passed to the state holding company Istituto per la Ricostruzione Industriale (IRI), while control of the company remained with its Trieste shareholders. In the same year Frigessi appointed the banker Enrico Marchesano as general manager and managing director for Italy.
Frigessi came from a Jewish family. After the Italian racial laws of 1938 he was removed as president and replaced by Fulvio Suvich, a former under-secretary at the Foreign Ministry. An exemption under the laws allowed him to keep his posts as general manager and managing director. After the German occupation of September 1943 he went into hiding. Marchesano then ran the company in the north, while from June 1944 Frigessi directed its operations in liberated central and southern Italy. In May 1945 the Allied military government had him arrested and interned until the end of July on suspicion of collaboration. He returned to the management in 1946 and was reinstated as president in 1947.
The war cost RAS most of its business in eastern Europe. Under the 1947 peace treaty Italian property in Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria was surrendered as war reparations, and the insurance markets of Czechoslovakia, the company's second-largest market, and of the other new communist states were nationalised. According to the International Directory of Company Histories, the withdrawal from eastern Europe cost the company almost a third of its total business. Because Yugoslavia claimed Trieste and the future of the city was uncertain, the legal seat was moved to Milan in 1947. Frigessi died in Trieste on 8 April 1950.
Read the full text
Postwar expansion
Marchesano had left his executive posts at RAS in 1948 to chair the IRI. After Frigessi's death he became president on 9 May 1950 and held the post until 1965. The death of Frigessi also broke the balance between the old Trieste shareholders and Italian industrial and banking capital. Marchesano encouraged the entry of the cement industrialist Carlo Pesenti, who in 1952 acquired control of RAS through Italmobiliare, the financial holding company of his group.
Piero Sacerdoti, who had run the group's French subsidiaries, was appointed general manager in 1949. He modernised the organisation and brought in IBM computers for administrative work. In the early 1960s RAS worked with the Milan savings bank Cariplo on products that linked bank deposits with life insurance. The group kept expanding outside Europe, especially in the Americas, and reached Australia in 1960 with Consolidated Insurances of Australia.
Ettore Lolli was president from 1967 to 1983. In 1980 RAS absorbed L'Assicuratrice Italiana. In 1983, two days after the publication of the law that allowed unit trusts in Italy, it launched the Gestiras fund.
Allianz ownership
Carlo Pesenti died in September 1984. His son Giampiero, who set out to reduce the group's debts through a series of disposals, sold the RAS stake to Allianz that year, the first of those sales. According to the International Directory of Company Histories, Allianz bought the Pesenti family's 38 per cent together with smaller holdings from Toro Assicurazioni and from Saes, a subsidiary of the Agnelli family's holding company IFI, and its share rose to 51.5 per cent in 1987.
In September 2005, when it owned about 55 per cent of RAS, Allianz announced a plan to acquire the rest of the company and merge it into itself. A public tender offer ran from 20 October to 23 November 2005 and raised Allianz's holding to 76.3 per cent of the ordinary shares. Before the merger RAS transferred its insurance business to a new subsidiary, which took the name Riunione Adriatica di Sicurtà S.p.A. on 1 January 2006. The other shareholders received three Allianz shares for every nineteen RAS shares. The merger took effect on 13 October 2006, when it was entered in the commercial register in Munich, and Allianz became a European company (SE). The shares of the listed parent, by then called RAS Holding, were delisted on 16 October, when Allianz shares began trading in Milan.
With effect from 1 October 2007 Allianz reorganised its Italian operations. The insurance business of Lloyd Adriatico and Allianz Subalpina was transferred to RAS, which was renamed Allianz S.p.A. The new company had its registered office in Trieste.
West Tankers case
A claim paid by RAS was the origin of a case decided by the Court of Justice of the European Union. In August 2000 the vessel Front Comor, chartered by Erg Petroli, collided with a jetty owned by Erg in Syracuse. RAS and Generali, Erg's insurers, compensated Erg under its policies and in 2003 sued the shipowner, West Tankers, before the court of Syracuse. The charter contained a clause providing for arbitration in London, and in 2005 the English High Court granted West Tankers an injunction restraining the insurers from pursuing the Italian proceedings. On a reference from the House of Lords, the court ruled in February 2009, in Allianz SpA v West Tankers, that such an injunction was incompatible with the Brussels I Regulation.
From Wikipedia’s article on Riunione Adriatica di Sicurtà, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4