Research On Marine Insurance Fraudulent Claims Under The British Law

Fraudulent claims are lingering nightmares of marine insurance industry.The UK has a long history of studying this problem and fruitful results.The basic process UK courts adopted to deal with fraudulent claims has two steps.First the court need to determine whether the claim is fraudulent.Then the court need to determine what is the legal consequences.As a result,the fraudulent claims theory follows this same logic.The theory was divided into two problems,the definition problem and the legal consequence problem.In the course of more than a century,Britain adopted the Marine Insurance Act 1906(referred to as MIA1906)and a large number of case laws to establish a set of rules for solving these two problems.However,as the situation changes,this set of traditional rules has gradually changed from a tool of prompting the marine insurance to an obstacle to the industry.Accordingly,the UK begun to reform this traditional fraudulent claims rule.Based upon Insurance Act 2015 and the DC Merwestone case,the UK's marine insurance fraudulent claims rule is ushered in a new starting point.Its basic idea and system framework have been reshaped.New fraudulent claims rule in UK have been formed.Insurance Act 2015 completed the transformation of the utmost good faith,established a new fraudulent claims legal consequence rule.And in the DC Merwestone's judgment,UK's supreme court lord justices specifically analyzed the issue of collateral lies,and defined the scope of fraudulent claims.But the new rule is not flawless.There are still some deficiencies and outstanding issues.First,the collateral lies were excluded from the scope of fraudulent claims which makes its legal consequences pending.Therefore,the insurers will be likely to take thing into their own control by inserting a collateral lies clause.There should be a discussion of the validity of this kind of clause under the new rule.Secondly,there are loopholes in the UK's Insurance Act 2015 on insurers' premium refund liability.Finally,it is a pity that whether insurers can sue for the loss of investigation costs were not defined in the new rule.Those problems need to be solved in the future.By contrast,marine insurance fraudulent claims problem in China are mainly decided in Maritime Law of the People's Republic of China and Insurance Law of the People's Republic of China.Comparing with the UK's new rule,the rule in China also has problems like unclarified definition and unclear scope.In addition,China's fraudulent claims rule has problems such as weak cohesion between regulations and unreasonable legal consequences of exaggerated claims.This thesis will make some specific suggestions for the further development of China's fraudulent claims rule based on the experiences of UK's New Rule.