Treasure Islands - Nicholas Shaxson [116]
It is hard to construct coherent intellectual justifications for hosting secretive offshore finance, so the usual technique is to engage the messenger, not the message. Attacks on dissidents mostly consist of mean-spirited little slurs and innuendoes: “This person is ignorant, motivated by envy, economically illiterate, unreliable, or mentally unbalanced; this person cannot be trusted.” Geoff Southern, a dissident deputy, said he now tries to avoid pointing in public: Last time he did he appeared in the Jersey Evening Post in a stunningly Hitler-like pose. He and his friend, Senator Trevor Pitman, wearily describe being tarred with terms like “Destroyers of Jersey” or “The Enemy Within”: They are accused in public of being driven by personal bitterness; hints are dropped about darker motives. When we spoke, both Southern and Pitman’s wife, Shona, another deputy, were being prosecuted for helping elderly and disabled residents fill in requests to opt for postal votes, albeit in breach of an arcane electoral law. They were later found guilty and fined. The amorphous finance industry is, locals say, ultimately behind the attacks. “The finance industry is like an amoeba,” said another Jersey politician, who declined to be identified. “You attack it, and it absorbs that, and attacks back. It is the parasite in the island. It has taken it over; it controls us and decides on everything that happens here.”
John Heys, a tour guide at Jersey’s world-famous Durrell Zoo, and his friend Maurice Merhet, a former printer and pig farmer, now retired, tell a similar story. “We live in a dictatorship,” Heys said, jabbing his finger at the table. “This is not a democratic country. John Christensen is public enemy number one. We call them the Junta, and people are afraid to stand up against them.” Heys showed me an email sent by a government minister to a dissident friend who had, in a cheeky Christmas message, pointed out the large sums stashed in secrecy in Jersey, amid global poverty. The minister responded—mistakes included:
Hi Traitor
Please refrain from sending me your unsolicited garbage . . . I am surprised you still decide to live in this “tax haven” island.ifs its so bad why do you not leave to live somewhere else . . . good riddance I would say…. but perhaps NOT because you get a damm good living here no doubt perhaps funded by banks and your morgage lende r . . . in fact my family have lived in Jersey for several generations and I am so very proud of it but to listen to traiterous idiots like you makes me furious. .
I would not have the nerve to wish you a happy christmas in fact I hope you continue to to live a miserable existence in your traiterous world
Do not respond
In tiny states everyone knows everyone else, and conflicts of interest and corruption are inevitable. There are no independent think tanks or universities; a small and vulnerable civil service; no clear division among the legislature, the judiciary, and the executive; and no second chamber to scrutinize the States Assembly’s deliberations. When Christensen was Economic Advisor, the public could not attend committee meetings and there was no written record of parliamentary debates on major laws. These problems extend to the governance of the finance industry. In Jersey there are no credible and truly independent processes for internally scrutinizing or regulating offshore finance. A 2002 publication from the Association of Accountancy & Business Affairs, one of the most detailed academic analyses of Jersey’s politics, puts it concisely. “Most Jersey politicians are in business,” it said. “They lobby for business and promote business interests. They draft, refine and pass legislation. They have also sat on regulatory bodies, effectively acting as ‘gatekeepers’ adjudicating on complaints and malpractices. Politicians sit on the boards of the companies that they are supposed to regulate.”8
Close relationships are inevitable in a small island, but it is precisely because of this that Jersey needs extra checks and more transparency, to weigh against the