Lloyds of London protects diamonds from stars

“You’d rather hope they wouldn’t drop it down the toilet, but you consider every eventuality,” says Michael Moss about his work insuring actors to wear multi-million-pound jewellery to The Oscars. Moss, a senior underwriter at XL Insurance, has arranged the insurance for countless jewel-laden stars at awards, weddings and festivals. “There are certain people we would insure and certain people we wouldn’t,” he says. “(The premium) very much depends on who’s going to be wearing it, the value of the piece and where it’s going to be worn.”

Ever the professional, Moss refuses to give examples, but estimates the premium to cover Julia Roberts wearing a $1 million necklace to The Oscars would be about $2,500 for the night. “You’d want cover whilst it was being worn, control of the transfer to her, she would have to sign for it and accept responsibility. And if you possibly could you’d want guards in the room,” he says amid the hustle and bustle of The Room in the Lloyd’s of London building in the heart of the City.

Moss says celebrities are usually restricted to gems worth less than $1 million because “if you’re talking about anything very much more than that they’d have to be surrounded by an army, and celebrities tend not to like being surrounded by an army because they want to be seen.”

Has anyone ever lost anything? “Oh yes.” How much have they lost? “We’ve had some six-figure losses. I’ve personally been involved in a case - about 25 years ago - where a certain lady had been given a $500,000 pair of earrings to wear at a Cannes nightclub. She didn’t want to dance with them on so she took them off and put them on a table,” says Moss. “Funnily enough, they weren’t there when she came back five minutes later.”

Moss, who brokered the deal, says the underwriter “may have regretted the decision”. And the mystery lady? “She wouldn’t have got into trouble but she’s probably never got insured ever again.”
Others on Moss’s black list include “people who said they have lost things only to be photographed wearing it later on”. Again, no names.

Moss, who has been in insurance all his working life, insures all of De Beers diamonds. And what poses the biggest risk to those diamonds? Celebrities? Accidents in the toilet? Daring heists? “The biggest risk to newly found diamonds is probably someone recognising that it is a diamond at a very early stage and trying to steal it - which would generally be an employee.”

Next up are Thomas Crown Affair-style raids. One of Moss’s most high-profile incidents was The Millennium Star, the world’s sixth biggest diamond, which thieves attempted to steal from the Millennium Dome. An armed gang used a JCB digger to smash into the Dome’s Money Zone as they tried to snatch the 203-carat Millennium Star and 11 other diamonds worth more than £350 million.

The police had been tipped off about the raid and warned De Beers and Moss. Insurance isn’t just about planes, trains, automobiles and diamonds. Mark Symons, an underwriter at Beazley, says “virtually anything can be insured”. He has arranged insurance for pop concerts to cover everything from terrorist attacks to paying out if rain stops play at the tennis. The Telegraph