Lloyd's sued over its role in slave trade
Ten black people will today launch legal action against Lloyd's of London over its role in the slave trade, when millions of Africans were shipped across the Atlantic in appalling conditions.
The ten have hired a top lawyer to launch the multi-million-pound lawsuit against the City of London insurer in a New York court.
They argue that Lloyd's, founded in 1688, insured many of the trading fleets which uprooted ten million people from their ancestral homelands inWest Africa.
Lloyd's will deny the charges but the plaintiffs plan to produce DNA evidence linking themselves to Africans who were transported on slave ships.
Leading the case will be Edward Fagan, the prominent US lawyer who forced Swiss banks to make a £680million settlement to victims of the Nazis. The US government will also be in the dock over its historic links with slavery.
The plaintiffs claim they are still suffering today because the slave trade robbed them of their identities.
They say this - and the mistreatment of their ancestors - amounts to genocide.
An estimated 30,000 slave ship journeys were made across the Atlantic over 300 years.
Conditions were so bad that up to a fifth of slaves died before they even reached the Americas.
Amid pressure from campaigners such as WilliamWilberforce, Britain abolished slavery in 1807 and the slave trade in
1833. A Lloyd's spokesman said last night: 'We have not seen the claim yet so we are in no position to comment.'
