거대위험보험에 관한 법적 연구

Abstract

As damages and losses from natural disasters have risen steeply in frequency and severity since the 1980s, the damages or losses have reached a scale never seen before and have gone way beyond the extent that can be reasonably covered by the conventional insurance market. Accordingly, there has been a heated discussion on the introduction of alternative risk transfer (“ART”), a new risk hedging that transfers natural disaster risks from the insurance market to the financial market where a multitude of individual investors participate. A case in point is Insurance derivative instruments and catastrophe bonds. Insurance derivatives and catastrophe bonds have much in common in that both of them are based on the concept of transfer the risks to the capital market. However, the former targets not ordinary investors but a certain group of financial professionals who are permitted to handle these complicated instruments. In this sense, insurance derivatives have certain limitations in terms of the scale of capital-raising compared with catastrophe bonds. Catastrophe bonds (“cat bonds” for short), in the meantime, refer to a relatively new risk management scheme with which insurers issue bonds to transfer natural disaster risks, such as earthquakes and typhoons, to the capital market. An innovative financial instrument with the features of bonds linked to insurance risks, cat bonds deliver high returns to investors at usual times, and provide policy holders with sufficient coverage during times of massive disasters. For successful implementation of cat bonds, the best possible option is to have insurers, with rich experience and expertise in risk assessment, management and takeover, take care of fund-raising via cat bond issuance as well as all risk-related works. In fact, the Korean government announced a 2nd-phase financial regulation overhaul plan of September 27, 2001, effectively lifting a ban prohibiting insurers from raising capital through corporate bond issuance. In addition, it also revised the Insurance Business Act on May 29, 2003, allowing insurers to provide its customers a collective investment fund instrument without obtaining a financial regulatory body’s permission. The recently revised German Insurance Contract Act (most recently revised in 2008 sets out a number of provisions explicitly associated with high-risk insurance products. According to Article 210 of the Act, the existing restraints on contractual freedom do not apply to high-risk insurance pools. In other words, this provision leaves the Act’s compulsory provisions ineffective for high-risk insurance pools, and at the same time gets insurers totally free from some of obligatory restraints on their high-risk insurance business. The loss of the binding force of the compulsory provisions and the control of insurance contract terms and conditions specified in Article 210 of the revised German Insurance Contract Act can be a useful guide for Article 663 (Prohibition of “reformation in peius”) of the Korean Commercial Code. As for cat bonds with characteristics of an insurance contract, it may be possible to form individual terms and conditions going against the insurance contract provisions of the Commercial Law because contract parties’ discretionary rights. However, the mandatory insurance contract provisions of the Commercial Law still keeps its Leitblidfunktion. Therefore, even for a high-risk insurance product, if its contract terms and conditions go against the Commercial Law requirements, it can be reasonably assumed that they are unfair. In that case, if the applicable insurer cannot prove the necessity of the deviated terms and conditions, they may become invalid.;천재지변으로 인한 재산손실의 빈도와 규모는 1980년대 이후 놀랄 만큼 증가하였고 피해규모의 거대화와 기존 보험시장의 인수능력한계에 부딪혔다. 보험시장이 아닌 다수의 투자자가 참여하는 자본시장으로 위험을 전가하는 새로운 기법으로서 대안적 위험전가기법(ART: Alternative Risk Transfer )이 논의 되고 있다. 이와 같은 위험전가기법으로 논의되고 있는 것 중 대표적인 것이 보험파생상품과 대 재해채권발행이다. 대 재해채권(Cat Bond)이라 함은 보험회사가 인수한 지진, 태풍 등 자연재해 리스크를 채권을 통해 資本市場에 전가하는 새로운 형태의 위험관리기법을 가 르 킨다. 債券의 특성과 保險危險을 결부시킨 새로운 개념의 혁신적인 金融商品인 대 재해채권은 평상시에는 투자자에게는 원하는 고율의 채권수익을 창출시킴과 아울러 대 재해 발생시에는 보험계약자에게는 충분한 보험급여를 지불하여 준다. 따라서 대 재해채권(Cat Bond)는 대 재해위험에 대비하기 위한 가장 효율적인 자본조달 수단으로서 여겨진다. 이에 본 논문은 대 재해채권(Cat Bond)의 개념 및 구조 등에 관해서 살펴보고, 우리나라에서 대 재해 채권(Cat Bind)의 현실적인 발행을 위하여 검토되어야 할 현행법상 문제점에 대해서 정리하였다. 또 2008년 전면 개정된 새 독일보험계약법은 거대위험보험에 관한 여러 명시적인 규정을 두고 있는데, 우리 상법 제663조의 불이익변경금지원칙 예외인정과 관련하여 보험 약관 통제 시 원용될 수 있는 독일보험계약법상의 논의에 대해서도 심도 있게 검토하였다.