Treasure Islands - Nicholas Shaxson [111]
An old offshore saying encapsulates it: “Those who know don’t talk, and those who talk don’t know.”
Other subtle checks on troublemakers abound. To stay in the Caymans, for example, you need a work permit. Any expatriate who causes trouble—whether a seconded police official, lawyer, regulator, or auditor—can have his or her work permit revoked by the “Cayman Protection Board,” which grants permits. Foreigners in the Caymans are made painfully aware of their vulnerability on this.
“If you blow the whistle and stay on the island—and this is general in offshore centers—you don’t have whistle-blower protections at all. If you speak up in one place, the network works in a way that you will never get work again. It is suicide, physically and economically. There is no way you would find protection.” My interlocutor chopped the palm of one hand with the other for emphasis.
“Have you seen the John Grisham film The Firm? It’s worse. It’s not only the lawyers—it’s the whole political environment.”
Before visiting the Caymans in 2009, I had contacted island authorities to request interviews and told them I had done work for the Tax Justice Network (TJN), the expert-led organization that criticizes secrecy jurisdictions like Cayman. On arrival, the government spokesman Ted Bravakis said because of this there was “no willingness to engage.” A decision to shun me, he said, had been taken “at the highest levels of government.”
Earlier, I had emailed a top official in the Cayman Islands regulatory apparatus, requesting an interview. He copied me into an email to local practitioners, criticizing efforts by his predecessor, Tim Ridley, to help me get interviews during my trip. “I do wish Tim would stop hawking this chap around as if to say he is doing us a favor,” the official wrote. “We are going to prepare a factual anodyne piece in writing but will decline any on the record interview.” I told him he may not have meant to copy me in on the mail. “Quite so,” he replied, then put his finger squarely on an important truth about such places. “I have no problem with you understanding how the world at large regards the comments of TJN,” he said. “I say so directly at every opportunity and meet with uniform agreement.”
In the official’s “world at large”—the offshore environment—there is no opposition to the establishment consensus, it seems.
There is, in fact, something generic about island life that encourages the group-think that the official describes. In his novel Snow Falling on Cedars, the writer David Guterson captures an essence of it. “An enemy on an island is an enemy forever. There is no blending into an anonymous background, no neighboring society to shift toward. Islanders were required, by the very nature of their landscape, to watch their step moment by moment.” The social and political inhibitions islanders feel, he continued, “are excellent and poor at the same time—excellent because it means most people take care, poor because it means an inbreeding of the spirit, too much held in, regret and silent brooding, a world whose inhabitants walk in trepidation, in fear of opening up.”
In the island goldfish bowl, you cannot hide. This ease of sustaining an establishment consensus and suppressing troublemakers makes islands especially hospitable to offshore finance, reassuring international finance that they can be trusted not to allow democratic politics to interfere in the business of making money. In the British tax