Good morning and welcome to The Hanover Insurance Group Second Quarter Earnings Conference Call and Webcast. All participants will be in listen-only mode. (Operator Instructions) Please note this event is being recorded. I’d now like to turn the conference over to Oksana Lukasheva, EVP, Investor Relations. Ms. Lukasheva, Please go ahead.

Thank you, Laura. Good morning and thank you for joining us for our second quarter conference call. Participating in today’s call are Fred Eppinger, our President and Chief Executive Officer; Marita Zuraitis, President of Property & Casualty Companies; and David Greenfield, our Executive Vice President and CFO. Before I turn the call over to Fred for a discussion of our results, let me note that our earnings press release, statistical supplement and a complete slide presentation for today’s call are available in the investor section of our website at www.hanover.com. After the presentation we will answer questions in the Q&A session. Our prepared remarks and responses to your questions today other than statements of historical fact include forward-looking statements. These are certain factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those anticipated by our press release, slide presentation and conference call. We caution you with respect to reliance on forward-looking statements and in this respect refer you to the forward-looking statements section in our press release, Slide 2 of the presentation deck and our filings with the SEC. Today’s discussion will also reference certain non-GAAP financial measures such as total segment income, after-tax earnings per share, segment results excluding the impact of catastrophes and development, ex-cat loss ratio, and accident year loss ratios among others. A reconciliation of these non-GAAP financial measures to the closest GAAP measure on a historical basis can be found in the press release or the statistical supplement which are posted on our website as I mentioned earlier. With those comments I will turn the call over to Fred.

Good morning and thank you for joining our call. The second quarter was a very eventful and important one for our company. Despite the unprecedented level of tornados and catastrophe losses that occurred in the U.S. we (inaudible) many of our financial and strategic goals and are poised to realize the benefits of our past investments. During a very active second quarter, not only did our claims organization respond very well to our agents and their client in an unprecedented period of destructive weather, but this year we have continued to make significant progress on advancing our journey. Improving our product portfolio, improving our ex-cat margins to pricing, mix management and improving expense levels and we continue to solidify our position with winning agents to an improving operating model and the more complete geographic (inaudible). As always I will begin our call this morning with some highlights of the quarter. Then Marita will share insight into our results and discuss some key trends and David will provide an update on our overall financial position. Our net loss this quarter was 32 million or $0.70 a share driven by after-tax catastrophe losses of 103 million or $2.27 per share. Our overall capital position, however, remains strong. Book value per share was $54.96 at the quarter end which is essentially equal to last quarter and up 4% from the second quarter of a year ago. On a pre-tax basis catastrophe losses in the quarter were 157 million or 20% of our combined ratio. The highest second quarter catastrophe losses in the company’s history. Catastrophe losses this quarter were five times our 10 year average for the second quarter. For the industry catastrophe events this quarter were among the worst that is ever experienced. In addition to being more frequent, these storms were…

Thanks Fred and good morning everyone. Fred reviewed the headlines for the quarter including catastrophes, so I will focus my remarks on our ex-cat performance and top line results in more detail. We are very pleased with the underlying performance during the quarter and more confident than ever about our future growth prospects. Our strong underwriting distinctive products and the quality of our agency relationships and high quality of our business mix, provide us with confidence for continue growth in the second half of the year and beyond. So, starting with Slide 4. Our second quarter combined ratio is 113.3 all in, and 93% excluding catastrophes. Our ex-cat ex-development combined ratio was 95 in the quarter representing improved performance from the 97.4 in the second quarter of 2010 and the 97.9 in the first quarter of 2011. We increased our net written premiums by almost 2% this quarter compared to a year-ago driven by 4% growth in Commercial Lines. On a year-to-date basis premiums grew 2.5% as a result of the 6% growth in Commercial Lines. Beginning with Commercial Lines on Slide 5. We had another strong quarter of top line growth, our growth was driven by our specialty product offering which was in line with our expectations but more importantly were extremely [classified] with the quality of the business that we’re writing. Slide 6, includes some metrics we wanted to share with you that demonstrate the quality of our book of business in our core lines. First our retention continues to improve. We are encouraged that despite our conservative pricing stance our retention increased 4% compared to the second quarter last year. Over the last several years we have focused on acquiring high retention account business through our best partners and this continues to translate into premium left. The…

Thank you, Marita. And good morning everyone. Fred and Marita have already reviewed our underwriting results with you, so I’d just like to add a few additional comments about our operations and balance sheet, some detail on the Chaucer transaction and the progress we are making with the integration. And finally, I’ll wrap up with some commentary on our guidance and expectations for the rest of 2011. As Fred and Marita mentioned, an unprecedented level of catastrophe losses impacted our earnings this quarter. As a result we recorded a net loss of $32 million or $0.70 per diluted share compared with net income of $2 million or $0.05 per diluted share for the second quarter of 2010. Segment income after-tax which excludes the impact of realized gain and losses on investments and other non-operating items was a loss of $38 million or $0.84 per diluted share compared with segment income after-tax of $2 million or $0.04 per diluted share for the second quarter of 2010. Included in non-operating items this quarter were approximately $11 million of transaction expenses primarily related to the acquisition of Chaucer. Additionally, non-operating items this quarter also reflected a loss of $4.7 million on the foreign exchange forward contract we entered into in connection with the Chaucer acquisition. I will review the components of the Chaucer acquisition, consideration and transaction expenses in a moment. Turning to Slide 12, I’d like to touch briefly on our investment portfolio and yields. As of June 30, our total cash and invested assets exceeded $5.6 billion which included the proceeds of the $300 million of senior debt we issued in June. As a result our cash balance at June 30, was 13% of the total portfolio, but a large portion of that balance was being held in order to close…

(Operator Instructions) Our first question is from Cliff Gallant of KBW.

Two questions. But first, stock prices obviously hitting a pretty low valuation here, and David talked a little bit about excess liquidity, what is your appetite for buying back stock here?

I think there is something I’d say is part of our opportunity or is part of our capital management equations Cliff. And I wouldn’t want to comment today that we would be buying stock in the open market or effectively saying we would change our strategy. I think what we said in our guidance is that we weren’t planning to repurchase any stock. We will consider the market activity in our calculations through the second half of the year, but I think as we have talked and as you heard from Fred, Marita, we have a lot of opportunities in our business and we need to be thoughtful about how we deploy our capital relative to business opportunities.

Okay. And my second question, just in regard to the Chaucer accretion, you've said in the past I think it was 10% earnings accretion is what you expected. You talk a little bit today about improving the yields out of that operation, and just looking at the historical earnings power of Chaucer and adding it to yours less the debt costs it seems like 10% is really on the low end of the range. Are there other additional costs that I'm not considering that would be incurred in the combination?

Yes, I think I’d start off by saying we have been relatively consistent overall in the way we have presented this. As I’ve mentioned in my comments, we are in there now working with the teams to integrate and look at business plans and look at how we are going to manage the business on a combined basis going forward. I think where we were previously in terms of our expectations were sort of holding to that today. You will hear more about what we think about Chaucer as we get into the fall and particularly when we release the opening balance sheet and convert all of their figures to U.S. GAAP basis. And then I think certainly you should expect to hear more from us about 2012 in the fall during our Investor Day.

As we plan together, November is going to be good time, we are going to talk about more detail. There is obviously some expenses like cash changes that from their tax rate to our tax rate that would be a little bit pressured. We are also looking at their portfolio given the changing rate environment to make sure that we are maximizing earnings and our potential going forward. So, there is a little bit of moving pieces. The guidance we gave for the next two quarters though obviously, is more than the marginal thing we guided at the close. So, as we got a little bit more clarity on their plans for the end of the year and how we felt about the market where we were with pricing, obviously the guidance we are giving for the second half is a little bit more robust than margin like we said. So, I’d expect in November as we look at ’12 in a more refined way. We will give you a better point of view on the combined entity, but again I think it's a little bit early because we are kind of planning and focusing where that portfolio is directed in a changing market environment. Now, I’d tell you more excited today than I was when I close. I mean everything we see about it is good, I like the team, I like the opportunity together and I think that the earnings power accelerates our ability to do, we are trying to do as a company towards kind of top quartile return.

(Operator Instructions) This concludes our question-and-answer session. I’d like to turn the conference back over to management for any closing remarks.

Thank you very much for participating on our call, and we are looking forward to talk you after the end of our third quarter.

The conference is now concluded. Thank you for attending today’s presentation, you may now disconnect.