Louisiana Insurance Commissioner James Donelon has asked a state court to limit the amount of information he must supply to a probe of alleged improprieties by executives of the state's insurer of last resort.
The commissioner, in a petition to the 19th Judicial District Court in Baton Rouge, La. argued that a subpoena from the state Legislative Audit Advisory Council for information on Citizens Insurance is overly broad and seeks privileged and proprietary information.
LAAC is probing whether officials of Citizens, the last resort property and auto insurer, misspent taxpayers dollars totaling $1 million. The state insurer is known as Louisiana Citizens Property Insurance Corporation, the Property Insurance Association of Louisiana, or PIAL, and the Louisiana Automobile Insurance Plan LAIP.
The department filed a petition for declaratory judgment and an expedited hearing yesterday.
The LAAC subpoena seeks all employee e-mails for every department employee as of Oct. 1, 2003 or later. In announcing its filing, the department claimed that the subpoena's request was "overly broad because the work of most of the 289 employees at the DOI has nothing to do" with the Citizens operation.
Additionally, the department said that Legislative Auditor Steve Theriot's office has been seeking records for six weeks, well before the Nov. 7 filing of the subpoena. "In fact," the department said, "the DOI has already waived all privileges it has regarding these three entities and has begun the transmittal of those records" to Mr. Theriot's office.
However, the department said it objected to some requests, arguing that some records are protected from disclosure for legal reasons.
Mr. Theriot said that, as of this morning, he had "not yet been officially served" with notice of the filing and a hearing, but that attorneys with his office were working to address the arguments made by the department.
He said the reason for seeking such a broad swath of records was that "there were both former and current employees who were instrumental in the creation and operation" of the entities in question.
Additionally, he said that "I still don't know what law" Mr. Donelon was referring to in his filing that would protect records from being disclosed under subpoena.
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