Bright heads for sun with £4m

MICHAEL BRIGHT, the bankrupt chief of failed Independent Insurance, and his wife are set to retire to Spain with combined assets of more than £4m. Bright's bankruptcy trustee Phillip Sykes, of Moore Stephens, said Mrs Bright's entitlement to her half-share of the couple's three properties would not be disputed.

He added there was no prospect of creditors winning any claim for Mr Bright's £3m-plus pension fund.

Sykes told the Evening Standard that the couple's Spanish villa, thought to be worth about £300,000, had not been put up for sale because Mrs Bright was planning to buy her husband's share of it from proceeds she will receive from the sale of their house at Smarden, Kent, and a flat in Wapping.

The asking price on the six-bedroom Kent house, on the market for nearly a year, has been cut from £2m to £1.5m. NatWest has a £300,000 mortgage on the property, meaning Mrs Bright stands to get about £600,000 from the sale if this price is achieved.

The Wapping flat has a price tag of just over £900,000 and no mortgage, giving her potential proceeds of another £450,000. This would leave Mrs Bright with cash of up to £900,000 after paying about £150,000 to her husband's creditors for his half of the Spanish villa.

The funds raised from the sales of Mr Bright's interests in the three properties - about £1.2m based on these prices - will go to creditors owed about £5m. More than £4m of this is owed to HSBC, which helped finance Mr Bright's purchase of a 6% stake in Independent. The insurer was worth almost £1bn at its peak.

Sykes said Mr Bright, who is at the centre of an investigation into Independent by the Serious Fraud Office, has no other assets of any significant value. But despite the huge loss faced by creditors, he is still guaranteed to be discharged from bankruptcy by August 2004. Sykes said the Welfare Reform and Pensions Act of 1999 ensured Bright's pension was excluded from the bankruptcy.

Independent went bust in the summer of 2001 amid allegations that to win business it had been undercutting its competitors heavily. City law firm Class Law is preparing a legal case against the insurer's auditors, KPMG, actuaries Watson Wyatt and the Financial Services Authority in relation to the collapse.

The SFO investigation is expected to be completed by the end of this year.