The Red Insurance Man

Behind drawn draperies in a ponderously furnished, strangely silent office on Vienna's Wohllebengasse (Alley of Good Living) lies one of the key outposts of the Communist drive for East-West trade. It is Garant Insur ance, a Russian-owned-and-operated firm set up under Austrian law, and its business is supplying coverage for Western businessmen who trade with the Soviet bloc. In the five years of its existence, Garant has seen its premium income soar from less than $600,000 to $4,000,000 this year; it now does business with some of the best-known manufacturers in Western Europe.

Westerners who want to trade with the Soviet bloc often find it difficult to get sufficient insurance against credit defaults or loss or damage to their goods after they cross the Iron Curtain. Western governments generally discourage or prohibit giving Communist customers anything but the most limited credit. And Western insurance firms, for the most part, consider such business neither safe nor profitable. One of the few U.S. firms to try it--a 15-company consortium--went out of business more than six months ago.

Garant gets around all this. Managed by a troika of Soviet citizens headed by Sergei Karpovich, 40, the company handles just about everything from automobile to aviation insurance, but its big business is insurance for exporters dealing with the Communists (including Red China). Luring Western businessmen with premiums as low as 0.1%--"completely unrealistic," complains one Western insurer--it pulls in trade by writing policies for almost every conceivable business risk. "What success do you suppose we'd have," asks one West German insurer, "in bringing action against a Communist state railway for negligence?" Garant has won a reputation for paying off quickly and without red tape when such trouble occurs.

Garant thus helps obtain for Soviet-bloc countries Western credit that otherwise would not be extended, and also pulls in the Western currency that Russia needs in her trade offensive. But in the "third-man" atmosphere of Vienna, few believe that its sole concern is insurance. It twice got into trouble for trying to buy into Western European projects in violation of Austrian law, and strong suspicion persists that it owns sizable shares of stock in several Western European manufacturers. It has ties with about 40 insurance agents in the West, has pressed the Austrian government for the right to become a full banking institution. But its image as an independent business is not helped by the fact that the upper three stories of Garant's five-story building house officials of the Soviet government.

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