Michael Skrbic was born in June 1957. English is recorded as his spoken language.
His early adult years coincided with the growth of London and Hong Kong as centres of international finance and insurance. Legal work in those centres often involved cross-border insurance, reinsurance and banking transactions, the field in which he later built his practice.
Skrbic's formal qualifications are recorded as admissions to the legal profession rather than as university degrees. He was admitted in England in 1986, and solicitors in England and Wales are admitted to the roll and regulated by the Solicitors Regulation Authority.
His Hong Kong admission followed in December 1987. The Law Society of Hong Kong is the professional body for solicitors there and maintains the register of practitioners, which records his admission.
Skrbic's career has combined legal practice with the insurance and banking sector. Earlier in his career he held senior roles at the insurers and reinsurers ACE Group and Zurich Financial Services, and with the investment banks Dresdner Kleinwort and Commerzbank. He also worked at the international law firm CMS Cameron McKenna. ACE Group is a Bermuda-based insurance group, and Zurich Financial Services was a Swiss insurance holding company formed in 1998.
Dresdner Kleinwort was the investment banking business of the German bank Dresdner, which had combined with the British merchant bank Kleinwort Benson in the 1990s. Commerzbank is a German bank founded in Hamburg in 1870. CMS Cameron McKenna is a London-based international law firm.
His most recent role before Bermuda was with Kennedys Law LLP, where he was a partner in the London and Hong Kong offices. Kennedys was founded in London in 1899 and for many years operated as a single-office firm specialising in insurance work.
In 2016 he joined Harneys as counsel in its Bermuda office, effective 4 April 2016, bringing a focus on reinsurance, insurance-linked securities and the capital markets side of insurance. Insurance-linked securities transfer insurance risk to investors through capital markets, with catastrophe bonds as a prominent example, and he had earlier been involved in the catastrophe bond market in its early years. Harneys was founded in 1960 in the British Virgin Islands by Harold Harney, and its Bermuda office was established in 2015 after a combination with the Bermudian firm Hurrion & Associates. He is also recorded as a partner of ASSOCIA TES.
Quotes from others about the person
Sarah-Jane Hurrion, Managing Partner of Harneys Bermuda, commented in 2016 that he has 'a wealth of international relationships in the ILS market.'
