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After that meeting my decision was firm. From Alex’s house I rang Terence Max and gave him to understand that I would no longer be able to work with my father. His answer was spontaneous,
“Then come to us - we need people like you.”
So, on Monday morning I took the train to London and went to Duke’s Place.
The conversation did not take long and we agreed that I would begin in London in a month time, as the director of a subsidiary company we were going to form. All formalities would be settled by the time I would arrive, and in a board meeting we would discuss the conditions.
I returned to Hamburg with a new sense for life and full of anticipation for a major change, "as the joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun" - Christopher McCandless once said.
On my way to Hamburg, whilst glazing through the airplanes window, lines from a Pop song sprang to my mind, that I could not find reference to the interpreter a certain Travis Beet - never mind:
Satan’s daughter Demenz Satan’s daughter Last caress I have a will of steel
I will not kneel
I don’t need your caress
You just can’t guess
I went to the firm as though nothing had happened. My plan was firmly set. First I visited some Hamburg business partners to inform them of the coming change, mostly Marine Insurance brokers, who assured me to continue working with me, wherever I was. One day, while I was having lunch with my friend Peter Behring, the representative of National Union Insurance Company (a subsidiary of the mighty US insurance group AIG), Peter told me that he had been commissioned by the European headquarters in Paris to place a quota share reinsurance treaty for the entire European Marine Cargo business. In plain language that meant a contract by which 80% of the premium were assigned to Reinsurers. That would be a large contract by anybody’s measure - an anticipated premium of about US $10 million.
When Peter heard that I was going to join the respected English brokerage firm of Cayzer Steel Bowater, he spontaneously promised to have it accepted in Paris that we would get the order to place the Re-Insurance contract. That would be a big boost.
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