El inconcluso régimen legal de las mutuas de seguros y la paulatina desmutualización del sector asegurador español
Abstract
Insurance mutual societies constitute a special way of exploiting the insurance activity characterized by its eminently mutualistic nature in opposition to the insurers with the form of corporations in which the lucrative interest of the entity predominates. However, the economic and financial requirements, the solvency and the technical bases that mutual societies and insurance companies must have to be authorized to operate in the different sectors have gradually been equated, so the differences between these two types of insurers are not so obvious and are not usually perceived by the policy holders themselves. A clear impulse to this process of assimilation has come from the Act 20/2015 of Ordinance, Supervision and Solvency of Insurance and Reinsurance Entities and its development Regulation, approved by Royal Decree 1060/2015. However, both regulatory bodies devote scarce precepts to mutual insurance societies in comparison with the previous regulations, which remain basically in force until a future specific regulation of mutuals is performed. The present study will discuss the origin and evolution of insurance operations through mutual societies, the legal nature of mutual relations between insureds and mutuals, and the main novelties of the current legislation, and the unfinished legal regime of insurance mutual societies, which can be summarized as three: prohibition of variable rate mutuals, changes in the regime of structural modifications in which a mutual participates, and recognition of the possibility of forming mutual groups based on non-capital bonds.
Received: 16 Abril 2018
Accepted: 18 May 2018
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