@Vizhnet blogs; Aegon or the Catholic Church. Who are the bad guys?

Last weekend i posted a ‘rant’ about Dutch insurance giant Aegon ‘paying’ a million to sexual abuse victims of a Roman Catholic priest. The stories and tweets all talked about a ’sexual abuse’ policy, ‘Aegon insures criminal acts’ and even worse. The story almost went viral (on twitter at least) but while everyone was busy slamming Aegon (i also did my bit) we appearantly forgot about the real bad guys. The abusing priest and the Church.

I decided to find some facts about this story and found the following. Things turned out to be just a bit different than the media presented (shocked? I’m not). Aegon definately made a mistake (or a few) but the catholic church takes first price.

• Somewhere around 2000 someone (a female) claimed to be sexually abused by a certain priest (or referent) of the Roman Catholic Church belonging to the Archdiocese of Utrecht.

• The management of this Archdiocese paid the victim a certain unknown sum.

• Subsequently the church claimed this unknown sum with the insurance company that handles their liability insurance (Aegon).

• Aegon logically refused to pay out. Obviously because damages coming from a criminal act (sexual abuse) are not covered by any general liability policy.

• The church took Aegon to court. Appearantly the court case took several years and this also involved repeatitly hearing the victim.

• In or around 2006 Aegon and the church came to an arrangement that stopped the case.

• Now in 2010 this story surfices again.

The arrangement.

Aegon states that the main motivation to come to this arrangement (and stopping this case) is that it they don’t want the victims to suffer even more. But this was 1 case. With 1 very unfortunate victim, 1 sum of money and 1 courtcase. And this arrangement is, surprizingly, not about this court case at all. This victim had been paid by the church and Aegon never paid 1 cent. So, contrary to what most media published, the ‘claim’ was never accepted and it was definately not for 1 million Euro’s. In fact, according to Aegon, they would not pay anything to any victim anyway. If they would agree to pay anything, they would pay their customers (in this case the church who had already paid the victim).

What was agreed is the following: Aegon would pay the church for any NEW claims from other victims. As long as these claims had to do with sexual abuse by church employees prior to 2000 and up to a sum of 1 million Euro’s. Not per case, but in total. Anything to do with claims from 2000 and later and over 1 million Euro’s would have to be paid by the church.

So, basically in 2006 Aegon reserved 1 million Euro’s, and they are waiting for the church to hand in their claims by sexual abuse victims that comply with the aforementioned terms. The ‘funny’ thing is that appearantly no claims have been made since this arrangement was agreed upon. That’s right, the money is still there.

The church is no longer a customer of Aegon, which makes me wonder who they insure with these days. To my opinion it is still hideously wrong for Aegon to commit to paying anything to the church, but at least they did not pay out based on the policy and they terminated their contract with the church. The fact that this church even thought of trying to ‘get their money back’ by means of their liability insurance is revolting. The knowledge that there are more victims out there, even though we all know it is to be expected, is simply hideous. As we speak one after the other scandal comes to light about abuse by roman catholic priests and nuns in the Netherlands.

I’m sure there will be more.

(sorry about any spelling or grammar mistakes – My checker is still messed up, and English is still not my first language)