International Executive Security Monitor

At this point, it's better he does not know

For employers that do have a kidnap and ransom insurance policy in place, there are requirements of the policy owners put in place by most good insurance companies like Lloyd’s of London.  The main requirement surrounds the secrecy of the policy, and exactly who in an organization can know about the existence of a kidnap and ransom insurance policy.

Good insurance companies will restrict access and knowledge to the K&R insurance policy to only a handful of individuals.  For example, if a company with expatriates puts a “flyer” in the expatriate assignment manual before each expat leaves for assignment saying “don’t forget you have $1,000,000 of kidnap and ransom insurance if you are ever abducted,” this would void most “real” kidnap insurance policies.

Although most people are not aware of this secrecy requirement, the reasons are rather obvious and are as follows:

1. The insured would become more of a target if it was public knowledge that a kidnap and ransom insurance policy was in existence.  Of course, this is more important for small to medium sized organizations.  Every potential terrorist or FARC-like organization in South America knows that companies like Exxon and Microsoft have K&R insurance, or have the ability to pay quickly.  Mega corporate employees are always targets.
2. If the abductors knew about the existence of a policy or even worse, the amount of insurance, there would be no ransom negotiation.  The kidnappers would know the exact kidnap lump sum benefit and request that exact amount with no negotiation possible.
3. The expatriate or travelling employee would immediately tell the kidnappers in the first 10 seconds of the abduction, “don’t harm me, my company can pay you $500,000 from our AIG Kidnap and Ransom insurance policy.”  As this may be good for the poor individual abducted, it would quickly have underwriters and insurance companies running for the exists and no longer accepting kidnap and ransom insurance risk.

In a large organization the knowledge of a K&R insurance plan may be limited to 5 or 56indivduals including the Director of International Human Resources, Director of Benefits, CFO, Treasurer, President, and one or two key assistants in those departments that see all emails and correspondence.