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Steve Hilbert is back in the insurance business.
The controversial co-founder and former CEO of life insurance giant Conseco Inc. (now CNO Financial Group Inc.) spearheaded the purchase of a small life insurance company operated out of Texas and plans to gradually build up its operations here.
Hilbert and his wife, Tomisue, joined with seven other investors to pay $7.2 million for Sterling Investors Life Insurance Co., according to documents filed with the Indiana Department of Insurance before it approved the official move of the company to Indiana.
Sterling Investors, which had been legally based in Georgia, had $19 million in assets as of June 30 and turned a profit last year of $420,000, according to documents filed with the Georgia Office of Insurance.
But Hilbert, 69, touts the fact that Sterling Investors is already approved to sell in 46 states. His plan is to pitch Sterling Investors to independent marketing organizations who can then carry the company's products around the country.
"Our goal is to make a small company into a medium-sized company and create good-paying jobs here in Indiana," said Hilbert, who is now chairman and CEO of Sterling Investors.
Hilbert co-founded Conseco in 1979 and raised the capital for the company via door-to-door sales around Indiana. The company started operations in 1982 and three years later went public. From then until Hilbert's forced resignation in April 2000, the company's assets skyrocketed from $102 million to more than $52 billion. Its workforce ballooned to 17,000.
Hilbert's undoing at Conseco was the March 1998 agreement to purchase Green Tree Financial Corp., a Minnesota-based consumer finance company, which...