The IOM: scheming, deceitful, contemptuous and hypocritical

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An occasional commentator on this blog called Jim for Justice had a letter under the above title in the Manx herald. It said:

The more we learn about the Isle of Man the more we come to discover that it has a financial services industry that is built of smoke & mirrors on quicksand foundations.

The banks & other financial institutions use the IoM as a cheap back street lockup that just take money & pass it on. A UK bank chooses to go off-shore for no other reason than it can operate with lower costs in order to make higher profits. The way the Manx finance houses advertise themselves is all smoke & mirrors designed to give the appearance of offering low risk security coupled with high returns on money placed there. The minute the benefits outweigh the cost these banks leave the island not on the next ferry (that's too slow) but on the next plane.

The simple fact is that once you deposit money in the Isle of Man it ceases to be yours! It becomes the property of the bank. You are nothing more than an unsecured creditor, a liability to the bank because it owes you money. The question of trust does not come into it, so if the bank goes bust you can only fall back on a discredited depositors compensation scheme that will not pay out 'on demand'.

If you have more than £50,000 on deposit you discover that there are secured creditors in front of you in the queue who will take what was once your money before you see a penny of it. Then you also discover that there's also those guys in wigs in front of you, & if the government can take a cut as well, it will. By the time you get to the cashier there's a huge chunk of your money gone!

The banks' information to potential clients is composed of 'smoke & mirror' advertising. The blurb is written to entice you to part with your money in their favour. You are a 'somebody' until you have parted with your money, then you become a 'nobody'. Unless you live on the IoM you are faceless - just a bank account number, a potential source of more money for them to make big money before you get your bit of interest. Then if it all goes wrong - tough! The bank's interest in you vaporizes instantly.

When KSFIOM shut its doors denying depositors access to their  savings, did they get a letter of profuse apology from the bank directors explaining what had happened and assuring them that they would be living on bread & water until they had done everything in their power to see that they  got your money back? No! Did they take a salary cut? No! Did they claim a bonus? YES! So now KSFIOM depositors have learnt at great personal cost & suffering that the IoM - its finance houses, its government & its failed Financial Supervision Commission - is scheming, deceitful, contemptuous & hypocritical.

There will be a day of reckoning.

Jim for Justice

It seems to me that Jim is remarkably perceptive about the broader impacts of the micro decision depositors in the Isle of Man take.


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