Clive Cowdery is nothing if not determined. Two years after jilting Friends Provident at the altar for a better offer from rival closed-life firm Pearl Assurance, he has returned to hunt down the insurance firm in a new guise.
Then, Resolution was a firm running closed-life policies - so-called zombie funds - which it had snapped up on the cheap during the stock market collapse in 2000. The subsequent stock market recovery had made Cowdery and the firm a tidy packet - cash badly needed by Friends Provident to continue to build its business. But the merger sparked a bidding battle for the cash-rich Resolution, ultimately won by zombie fund rival Hugh Osmond and his Pearl business, with a £4.98bn cash offer in November 2007 at the top of the market. But that was not the end for Resolution, which reinvented...
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