The policy will cover extortion payments, legal fees and trauma counselling in the event of kidnap.

A few of the sectors that are at high risk in Uganda include NGOs (non-governmental organisations and non-profits), oil companies, and telecommunications.  The AIG product was already available in Kenya and South Africa, and AIG U.S. offers companies with expatriates global expatriate kidnap and ransom insurance policies.

With the discovery of oil in the country, in a region that has some pockets of instability, it was crucial to respond to these unique challenges.

Today’s business leaders are charged with breaking new markets and territories. This puts us face-to-face with new challenges such as having to work in politically-unstable regions of which are some of the best drivers for kidnap, ransom or extortion.

AIG works in collaboration with Clayton Consultants Inc., which specialises in the prevention and resolution of a kidnap for ransom, extortion, malicious product tampering and wrongful detention.

Clayton Consultants, a Triple Canopy company, is a crisis management security consultancy offering incident response, security consulting and training services to clients across the globe. Clayton specializes in the prevention and resolution of kidnaps-for-ransom, extortions, malicious product tampering and client risk.

Clayton consultants are experts in the field of crisis resolution with decades of government, military, foreign service and private industry experience. Strategically located around the world, Clayton’s consultants support clients in an advisory capacity based on their security expertise and an intimate knowledge of the local culture. Clayton, collectively has resolved more than 1,500 confirmed kidnap-for-ransom and extortion cases.

Triple Canopy, a security solutions company, acquired Clayton Consultants in 2007.

Mark Courtney, a consultant with Clayton Consultants, said the kidnap for ransom globally is worth $13,000,000,000 and only 50%of kidnappings are reported.  While kidnap cases are on the rise around the world, some can be prevented through security measures.

He noted that Africa is beginning to register a rise in kidnap cases to 17%, up from 5% seven years ago.

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.