Kidnap and Ransom Insurance 101
Do these four know the risks traveling in Kuwait? Is there an emergency security plan in place?
In our first blog in the “learning category” we will go over the basics of Kidnap and Ransom insurance (Kidnap and Ransom Insurance 101). However just knowing what is in this post is enough to put your knowledge over about 80% of all others in the HR and insurance arena. Not many have a good grasp of this important employee benefit.
Kidnap and Ransom insurance is offered by large insurance companies and Lloyd’s of London to insure global organizations and wealthy individuals and families. The basic element is an kidnap “insurance benefit” that would be used to pay a kidnapper in the event of abduction and provide the ransom money to get the person back, but there is much more to this insurance benefit. The other major parts of a good k&r insurance scheme is as follows:
- Extortion Payment | demands following a specific written or verbal threat to injure, kill, or kidnap a person; damage property; contaminate products; divulge trade secrets; or destroy electronic data by computer virus. Extortion is actually much more common than kidnap itself.
- Wrongful Detention | Involuntary confinement by a government entity or insurgent organisation.
- Hijack | Illegal holding under duress of a person while travelling on any aircraft, motor vehicle or water vessel.
- Services of an independent international security company. In the event of one of the incidents above, only a global security company will be able to mobilize individuals trained in international executive security and kidnap and ransom.
An insurance benefit of several million dollars is really worthless without an excellent security company ready to intervene.
