What is your experience of the most common insurance claims on historic deals, or transactions where insurance would have helped the M&A process? Examples provided.

In the recent real estate deal I just mentioned, there was environmental issue because no one knew if there was something in the soil. The seller didn’t want to give guarantees, but the buyer wanted guarantees for the issue. We took the insurance to allow the buyer to buy without concern. We also see tax issues being insured or questions regarding titles to shares. In a lot of discussions, we realise that the parties would like to insure known risk, but this is not possible since only unknown risk is insured in Germany.