All in all, it hasn't been a great year for Hartford. First, it had to go down to Virginia to litigate with an insured about contaminated peanuts. Then there were rumors about HFS selling off its P/C business. Now John Heintz has sued Hartford and several other insurers for failing to pay up in a convoluted case involving cheap Chinese imported food products.
The Hartford Courant recently reported that a new class action has been filed by the Kelley Drye law firm in the U.S. Court of International Trade in which the mellifluously named "Honey Sioux" company and other U.S. food producers allege that Harfrod, Great American, XL and a division of Swiss Re aided and abetted the dumping of cheap Chinese food products in the United States by issuing customs surety bonds that guaranteed the payment of any dumping duties that the U.S. government later determined were owed. The suit also seeks recovery against the U.S. Customs and Border Protection and the U.S. Department of Commerce, which are accused of failing to collect hundreds of millions of dollars in anti-dumping duties that the plaintiffs now seek to recover under these policies.
The plaintiffs are represented by John Heintz, Chairman of Kelley Drye’s insurance recovery and litigation practice group, former partner of Scott Gilbert and a veteran of the pollution coverage wars of the 1980s and 1990s. In a Kelley Drye press release, Heintz explained that"Because these importers were new, thinly capitalized, and had little or no credit history or experience in importing, the insurers knew or should have known that the importers posed an extremely high risk of defaulting on assessed dumping duties. The insurers, nevertheless for years, continuously issued the bonds on behalf of the importers, and made millions of dollars in premiums."
