American Safety Completes Bluestone Acquisition
American Safety Insurance Holdings, a Bermuda holding company, has completed the acquisition, for cash, of Bluestone Agency, Inc., a privately held agency that focuses primarily on transactional commercial surety, and its Cayman insurance subsidiary, Bluestone Surety, Ltd.
Headquartered in Charleston, South Carolina, Bluestone offers a common sense underwriting philosophy and best-in-class technologies for the underwriting, management and distribution of contract and commercial risks. In 2011 Bluestone wrote approximately $16,000,000 in premium, primarily composed of low limit transactional commercial surety premium.
“We are excited to have David Pearlstein and the rest of the Bluestone team join the ASI family. We have added a talented team of professionals with significant experience in the surety market furthering our strategic objective of growing our surety product offerings,” said Joseph D. Scollo, Jr., ASI’s President and Chief Operating Officer. “The acquisition significantly expands our footprint in the commercial surety space providing a good balance to our existing contract surety business.”
David Pearlstein added, “We are excited to join the ASI team. The combination of Bluestone with ASI’s existing surety capabilities will provide for a powerful product offering in the market. We believe the acquisition will open up additional distribution channels for us in the surety space allowing us to execute on growth opportunities we currently see in the marketplace.”
FBR Capital Markets & Co. and Locke Lord LLP served as financial advisor and outside legal counsel, respectively, to Bluestone in connection with the transaction.
