The Financial Times reports that several parties have already shown an interest in the Isle of Man-based company, which operates under Lloyds’ insurance arm Scottish Widows and manages approximately $5bn in funds.
The company has appointed Fenchurch Advisory Partners, a London-based financial advice firm, to handle the sale.
A spokesperson for Lloyds declined to comment.
In 2009, CMI disappeared as a brand when Clerical Medical’s intermediary business merged with Scottish Widows, although there was no change to its Isle of Man-administered products.
In 2012, the company Scottish Widows closed CMI to new business as part of its withdrawal from the offshore bond market, labelled as its “intermediary strategy”.
It came after a review directed by Toby Strauss, Lloyd’s group director for insurance at the time, into how the company could expand within its current core markets of pensions, protection and investments.
ABI figures for total new business sales of UK distributed offshore bonds for 2011, released a month after the closure, came in more than 7% below 2010 levels, with many at the time seeing this as a sign of how competitive and difficult the UK market for such products had become.
