Isle of Man reaction to Foot
October 29th, 2009
Foot Report gives Isle of Man praise - Isle of Man Today .
On the face of it Mr Foot appears to have produced a fair and balanced report that reflects well on the Isle of Man.
Whether that will please the UK Treasury, which seems determined to put the squeeze on the Isle of Man and other offshore jurisdictions, is a matter for debate.
Hard to see how these comments can be reconciled.
The Foot Report says diversify your tax base and raise more of it yourself.
The UK takes action to ensure the IoM has to do that. And it gets tetchy.
Not a fair and balanced response, I’d say.
Pot, Kettle, Black - I think that there are some lessons in Financial management and prudence that good be learnt by the Government commissioning the report from the countries it assess.
I think Guernsey’s reaction is more interesting — they appear to find it a rather sinister document:
http://www.thisisguernsey.com/2009/10/30/darlings-demands/
@John
John
Rumour is that the Foot team had to haul ass to their HM Treasury masters each week to give an update. Even with this heavy-handed interference, the report is OK for the CDs and Richard doesn’t like it.
Girrl in Jersey
Sir Michael Foot said nothing about the Isle of Man that we didn’t already know. The IoMtoday report selects ‘the good news’ but deliberately avoids the bad. The Review was critical about the lack of any credible structure to cope with a crisis in its banking sector, & the serious shortcomings of the Depositors’ Compensation Scheme.
Reading between the lines Foot made observations that would make a wise & prudent person think twice before being lured by higher interest rates into depositing offshore. Depositing on the Isle of Man can not be considered safe & secure until there is a new & credible compensation scheme in place that delivers quickly what it promises should the deposit taker be in trouble.
Until then the message is clear, depositors can’t bank on the Isle of Man to look after their life savings in a manner that gives them total peace of mind through an unambiguous assurance that their money is in safe hands.
Jim
http://ksfiom-blog.blogspot.com
@Jim for Justice
Jim
Why should a depositor in a bank have “total peace of mind”? You seem infected with the Western myth that banks float in a space just below the throne of God.
The Girrl
Hi Jersey Girl,
That is EXACTLY what was promised me by 2 banks on the Isle of Man. In the week before KSF collapsed I was contacted by the bank urging me to transfer funds immediately to my new deposit account with the assurance of the managing director that my money was GUARANTEED secure. By good fortune I declined to make an online deposit transfer, electing instead to credit my account by cheque which I managed to stop before it was cashed.
The lesson I have learnt from this experience is that it is in effect the banks of the IoM that project THEMSELVES as floating just below the throne of God, but experience has shown that they profess ‘good intentions’ but are capable of being ‘roads to hell’ as depositors in 3 of its failed banks have learnt from their bitter experience.(see http://www.kaupthingiom-dag.co.uk)
Jim
Jim,
As you will know there is no such thing as a true Isle of Man Bank anymore. Even the one with that name is part of RBS.
All the High Street Banks are just branches of the same one’s in the UK, albeit with an ‘International’ suffix.
I would suggest that the Isle of Man based banks are therefore no different to their UK branches. (It would also have helped KSF depositors had the UK not spirited away their deposits in the dead of night and then frozen them, using anti-terrorist legislation to do so.) Perhaps if the UK would be kind enough to return the ’stolen’ moneys, then the depositors would probably get all their deposits back.
Quote me if I’m wrong, but have not 75% or so of depositors not had all their money back?
Phil
Ahh..so your government really is just an agent for the big banks
I suspected so all along
Richard
I don’t see the word ‘Government’ in my comments: Clearly you are better than me at reading between the lines.
@Phil Harrison
No: offshore subsidiaries are not the same as onshore branches, having a completely different legal status. That is how the KSF disaster was engineered by the UK Government in the first place. In the winding-up order for KSF UK (which was a standard liquidation order, not related to anti-terrorism provisions) a clause was inserted preventing the return of monies loaned from “related entities that are not subsidiary branches” (or very similar words; I do not have the relevant document to hand).
It is hard to see, in retrospect, what intention that particular clause had other than to collapse the offshore bank and deprive its customers of their life-savings. Had that clause not been inserted, offshore customers’ deposits would have been returned and the Isle of Man bank, which was fully solvent, could have continued trading.
Even more seriously, the UK Government has now negotiated the (eventual) reimbursement from the Icelandic Government of all funds lost in the UK bank. No such arrangement has been reached for the Isle of Man customers, despite our paying the UK Government several million pounds a year to represent our international interests.
I would expect a large number of pro-independence candidates to be standing for the Keys in 2011.
@Phil Harrison
Yes, those with under 50k have got, or are getting, 100% back. However those who were forced to use an offshore bank (due to 2007 UK ‘Know your customer’ legislation) have lost much more.
Family in tatters - and now the other side of the world - and everything lost. 30 Years of hard word taken by Alistair Darling - £160,000. Anything we do get back goes to my family in the UK now. Shame on the UK Government. See http://www.theukgovernment.com for the whole sorry story.