Stirring words from Admiral as the car insurance giant announced its latest financials. Given all the doom and gloom we hear about the insurance industry in the face of a rapacious compensation culture, it was something of a surprise to hear that group profits were up 13% to £299m in 2011.

Chief operating officer David Stevens is looking forward to an even brighter future after the government’s civil litigation reforms kick in. ‘Hopefully,’ said Stevens, ‘the result will be some much-needed reform of an often dysfunctional system to the benefit of customers and ultimately insurers.’

Presumably this dysfunctional system includes the payment (and acceptance) of referral fees. So you’d expect Admiral to be dead against this practice, right? Well, not exactly.

A company spokesman said: ‘When an Admiral policyholder has an accident which is not their fault they will contact us. In some cases they will have suffered a bodily injury. Admiral will put them in touch with a third party who can assist them in recovering their loss. We would not do this unless the customer agreed that they wanted this assistance.’

So is the system dysfunctional, or not? How apt that one of Admiral’s subsidiaries is confused.com.