Admiral chief executive Henry Engelhardt says the motor insurer has no plans to stop taking referral fees.
£142m or 52% of Admiral's 2010 UK car insurance profits came from ancillary sales, including "acceptance fees".
The government has described referral fees as "rotten". The ABI has called for a complete ban on the fees.
In a report in the Telegraph, Engelhardt blamed the current situation on the Labour government that abolished legal aid for personal injury law cases in 2000, allowing no-win, no-fee lawyers to pick up the demand from people with injuries they cannot afford to have treated.
He said that if the present Government is unhappy with insurers' role in the current system, it should make the payment of the fees illegal.
"Let them change the law," he said. "We are not doing anything illegal and we are not doing anything immoral. We're not doing anything that I would not tell my mother about."
Admiral's figures do not disclose how much it receives in referral fees.
However co-founder and chief operating officer, David Stevens, suggested that their proportion to the company's total ancillary fee intake is similar to the group's 12% share of the UK motor insurance market.
"Our understanding is that numbers collated from across the industry indicate a total revenue from legal referral fees across the UK market of about £100m – less than 1% of the £15bn UK motor insurance market and less than £5 per policy," said Stevens.
"If you bear in mind our share of the motor insurance market, you get a feel for the sort of numbers we are talking about."
No comments yet