By Lorna Tan, Senior Correspondent

The blanket move by insurer Great Eastern Life to buy back GreatLink Choice (GLC) investment-linked insurance products (ILPs) must have seemed too good to be true to affected policyholders.

To recap, some 18,000 of them bought these products, which are a series of single-premium ILPs sold in five tranches between 2005 and 2007, netting Great Eastern $594 million in premiums.

Like Lehman Minibonds, GLC was linked to a class of complex financial instruments whose value has been badly hit by financial markets heading south.

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