Freedom to Define Membership in a Mutual Insurance Company

Abstract

A mutual insurance society is one of the basic forms of conducting insurance activity. It is characterized by a very wide range of options which its founders and subsequently entitled members have in order to choose the organizational and systemic model of operation, to change it in the course of business, to define the concept of membership, to create various categories of members and provide them with different rights and duties, to determine the powers of statutory bodies, and, above all, to apply the method of mutuality. The Insurance and Reinsurance Activity Act regulates the basic legal framework of mutual companies, while referring quite a number of issues to the Polish Commercial Partnerships and Companies Code. This does not alter the fundamental principle on which the company's activity is based, namely that its articles of association play an extremely important role, which is much greater than in the case of public limited liability companies, and that members of a mutual insurance society enjoy considerable freedom to conduct business and categorize its members, which is unparalleled for other legal forms of business activity.