Treasure Islands - Nicholas Shaxson [126]
Still, the UK had been holding out against an LLP law and for once was doing the right thing. “The UK . . . wanted to tell the world, ‘You can trust London,’” said Sikka, who researched the Jersey LLP affair. “If it is impossible to sue the auditors, that makes it harder to look clean.” The accountants had other ideas. “I think the calculation was that if the UK fell, the rest of Europe would fall, and the former British Colonies would also fall into place. They thought: ‘If the UK gets going, everything else is won.’”
The accountants’ strategy was simple: find an easy-to-influence legislature offshore, win LLP concessions there, then threaten to relocate there if the UK refused to create its own LLP law. First they approached the Isle of Man, then Guernsey, for an LLP law, but they were turned down. Then they came to Jersey, which is, as Jersey senator Stuart Syvret put it, “a legislature for hire.”
A month after that initial letter, Price Waterhouse and Ernst & Young publicly announced the proposed Jersey LLP legislation. Senior Jersey politicians had assured them that the bill would be “nodded through,” as one insider notes.
Not everybody was happy. Jersey’s senior law draftsman complained that the new law was like “getting a completed crossword and being asked to write the clues.” Syvret remembers first coming across the proposed law. “I knew bugger-all about accountancy, and suddenly it was on our desks and we had to debate it in two weeks,” he remembers. He and Gary Matthews, one of the only other dissidents in the legislature to smell a rat, set about educating themselves about LLP laws. Matthews contacted a British parliamentarian, Austin Mitchell, who in turn called Sikka. They soon began to understand what this law meant. Matthews put it bluntly. “This law is poison.”
Sikka remembers Matthews and Syvret first contacting him as they scrambled to get up to speed. “Gary Matthews said, ‘They want to rush this through parliament and I don’t understand a word—and other people I’ve spoken to don’t understand it either.’” “I’d been there on holiday but had taken no interest in this funny little island, until that fateful call from Gary Matthews. The more we looked into it, the more rotten the place looked.”
Matthews and Syvret were up against a well-resourced and motivated establishment on an island whose very political structure makes dissent extremely hard. Jersey has no political parties. The 53 members of the States (or government) are directly elected, but in three separate groups: 12 senators, 29 deputies, and 12 parish constables (known as connétables). Elections are staggered over time, so there has never been a general election or a change of government. There is no tradition of “government” versus “opposition” but instead a permanent regime that evolves over time.
This dramatically weakens opponents of an establishment consensus. “When bad men combine,” the conservative thinker Edmund Burke wrote, “the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.” Without political parties, good men and women are isolated, then picked off.
“Democracy doesn’t work here,” said Geoff Southern, one of few dissident deputies in the Jersey assembly. “There are 53 Members, but nobody can stand up and say, ‘Vote for us and we will do this as a bloc.’ Instead, it’s ‘I am a good bloke—vote for me.’ Manifestos are just candy floss.”30 Jersey politics is about personalities, not issues; without shared platforms States Assembly members tend to look after themselves rather than embrace common agendas more likely to reflect the public interest. “For the last two hundred years the establishment has cultivated the notion that party politics is wicked, divisive, and harmful,” Southern said. “The media spreads it. If you did a survey, I expect two-thirds would say they think party politics