Editing Lloyd's of London (section)

===Late 1970s: Sasse scandal and other issues===
The collapse of the Sasse syndicate came after it wrote a "binding authority" in 1975 that delegated underwriting authority to Florida-based expatriate Dennis Harrison to write property and fire risks through his Den-Har Underwriters agency, even though Den-Har was not an approved Lloyd's coverholder (a fact noticed neither by Sasse nor Lloyd's Non-Marine Association). Den-Har had suspected [[American Mafia|Mafia]] links and many of the risks written were rigged: typically dilapidated buildings in slums such as [[New York City|New York]]'s [[south Bronx]], which soon burned down after being insured for large sums.

Once the three-year Lloyd's accounting period passed, the 110 Names on syndicate 762 were told they faced substantial losses, from mostly fraudulent claims. Sasse's reinsurer, the [[Instituto de Resseguros do Brasil]] (IRB), refused to pay its share of the fraudulent losses. The Names (few in number for such large losses) took legal action and ultimately paid only £6.25m of {{circa}} £15m of Den-Har claims under the 1976 year, leaving the Corporation of Lloyd's to pay the remainder. The Corporation also paid the near £7m loss for 1977.<ref name=Hodgson/> Lloyd's banned Sasse from the market for life in 1985; he died on 28 February 1987.

Sasse had also been one of 57 underwriters on other syndicates that wrote loss-making "computer leasing" policies in the late 1970s. These claims ultimately ran above $450m, wiping out more than half the entire market's profit in a single year.<ref name=Mantle/>

Problems also developed out of the Oakley Vaughan agency run by brothers Edward and Charles St George, which had written far more business than its capacity allowed in order to invest premium to take advantage of high interest rates. By writing swathes of business regardless of whether the premiums were adequate, the St Georges left their Names with serious losses. Lloyd's had commissioned investigations into Oakley Vaughan, but investigators were denied access to the books and relied only on reassurances that the agency was profitable.<ref name=Luessenhop>{{cite book|last=Luessenhop|first=Elizabeth|title=Risky Business|year=1995|publisher=Scribner|location=New York|isbn=0-684-19739-1|url=https://archive.org/details/riskybusinessins00lues}}</ref>

Arising simultaneously with these developments were wider issues: first, in the US, an ever-widening interpretation by the courts of insurance coverage in relation to [[workers' compensation]] for [[asbestosis]]-related claims, which created a huge hole in Lloyd's loss-payment reserves, which was initially not recognised and then not acknowledged. Second, by the end of the decade, almost all of the market agreements, such as the Joint Hull Agreement, which were effectively [[cartel]]s mandating minimum terms, had been abandoned under pressure of competition. Third, new specialised policies had arisen which had the effect of concentrating risk: these included "run-off" policies, under which the liability of previous underwriting years would be transferred to the current year, and "time and distance" policies, whereby reserves would be used to buy a guarantee of future income.