The Case

Marine insurance Contract of marine insurance. In finding for the claimant reinsured in a dispute with the defendant reinsurer over the existence and validity of a contract of reinsurance, the court commented, per curiam, that the wording of s53(1) of the was clear. It procured a situation in which, absent agreement to the contrary, the insurer might look to the broker for payment of the premium. There was no mention of the fictitious mechanism by which that result was achieved at common law. Nor was there any need for such a mention. Statute had produced the necessary result. An intelligent member of the Lloyd's marine insurance market looking at the Act in 1906 could not have been expected to read the fiction into the section with the consequence that, not only could an insurer obtain the premium from the broker but, without more, no policy could ever be treated as invalid for non-payment of the premium because the assured was always to be treated as having paid it. Section 53(1) meant what it said and no more.