Ion Iosif

Engineer, graduate of the Faculty of Power Engineering at the Polytechnic University of Bucharest, with postgraduate specialisation in non-destructive testing at the same university and further studies in marketing and international economic affairs.

He has worked since 1997 in technical inspection, certification and independent verification, and since 2015 as a senior surveyor for an international classification and certification society. He has worked on offshore installations and at construction yards in the North Sea, the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, as well as in China, South Korea, Nigeria and North Africa. He acts as independent competent person and independent verification body for installation operators, verifying compliance with the written scheme of examination, with pressure systems regulations and with the performance standards of safety critical elements. Previously he coordinated certification and inspection work for offshore installations, pressure systems, pipelines and steel structures, as an integrity engineer, quality assurance manager and inspection manager.

His work spans several technical disciplines, which allows an installation to be assessed as a whole rather than only the component that failed:

• high and low voltage electrical installations, switchboards, transformers and uninterruptible power supplies;
• instrumentation, control and automation, including integrated control and safety systems;
• mechanical and process equipment and process piping;
• pressure vessels and pressure systems;
• lifting equipment and lifting accessories;
• fire prevention, detection and fighting systems, together with life-saving equipment;
• occupational health and safety and industrial process safety.

He holds ISO 9712 level III certification for non-destructive testing by radiographic, ultrasonic, magnetic particle and penetrant methods, is an international and European welding inspector (IWI-S and EWI-S), a lead auditor for ISO 9001 quality management systems and a competent person for the examination of lifting equipment and accessories. He holds the international NEBOSH certificate in oil and gas operational safety and training in electrical safety rules. He is a member of leading British professional institutions: the Institute of Marine Engineering, Science and Technology (MIMarEST), the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (AMIMechE) and the Institution of Engineering and Technology (MIET).

Within the office he provides specialist technical advice for the analysis and preparation of cases involving technical failures, industrial accidents, accidents at work, fires, explosions, equipment breakdowns and disputes over insurance indemnities. His experience allows technical matters to be built into the legal strategy of the case from the pre-litigation stage, by identifying the mechanism by which the event occurred and critically assessing the existing technical documentation. Working with the attorney, he helps establish the technically relevant facts, isolate the real causes of the loss and identify the evidence needed to support the claims or defences advanced.

His expertise is particularly useful in cases concerning:

• insurance disputes: property, third-party liability, CAR and EAR policies, industrial and energy risks;
• fires, explosions and failures of industrial installations and equipment;
• accidents at work and technical incidents;
• defects in design, execution, installation or maintenance;
• the liability of manufacturers, contractors, designers or operators;
• recourse actions brought by insurers;
• technical assessment of loss adjusters’ reports and of expert reports, whether obtained privately or ordered by the court.

For the office he reconstructs how the event unfolded, whether it concerns damage to property or an installation or an accident at work: the sequence of technical facts that led to it, the point at which the chain of causation broke, the factors that actually contributed and those that merely accompanied the event. That reconstruction produces the answers that decide an insurance file: whether the risk that materialised is the risk insured, whether an exclusion clause applies, whether the failure stems from a defect in the property, from normal wear, from improper operation or from maintenance that was not carried out, what part of the loss is the direct consequence of the event and what part pre-existed it, and whether there is a third party against whom the insurer may bring a recourse action. In cases of accidents at work he establishes whether the safety measures were in place and observed at the time of the event, whether the personal protective equipment, the training and the authorisation of the worker matched the risk of the task, and to what extent a technical non-compliance contributed to the accident. He supports these findings before the insurer, the court or the arbitral tribunal.

His involvement allows files to be prepared thoroughly, relevant technical questions to be put to court-appointed experts, expert reports to be assessed critically, and a strategy to be built that is sound in both legal and technical terms.

Working languages: Romanian, English, French and Italian.