Saturday, October 10, 2009

Monkey business on the Isle of Man

In a comment in response to a letter in the Manx Herald here   International Publicity Inc said:
WARNING: MONKEY BUSINESS GOING ON - NEVER BANK ON THE ISLE OF MAN

Well here's a tale of monkey business that explains how the financial industry conspires to rip off you & me into believing that it is there for us.

Back in 2008 a man named Bond appeared in a jungle village & and announced to the villagers that he would buy monkeys for £10 each.

The villagers rushed into the forest and started catching them. Bond bought thousands at £10 each, but as the supply started to diminish, the villagers stopped their efforts, feeling they had enough lolly. So as an incentive Bond announced that he would now pay £20 per monkey.

This renewed the efforts of the villagers and they started catching monkeys again. Soon the supply diminished even further and the villagers decided they had had enough of this hard work.

But Bond increased the reward to £25 each, so into the depths of the jungle they went until the supply of monkeys became so small that it was an effort find a single monkey, let alone catch it!

So now Bond announced that he would buy monkeys at £50! However, because he had to go to the City on business, he said that his assistant, Stock, would now buy on his behalf.

In the absence of Bond , Stock told the villagers: 'Look at this big cage - full of all the monkeys Bond has collected. I will sell them to you at £35 each, and when Bond returns from the City, you can sell them to him for £50 each.'

The villagers scraped together all their hard-earned, lifetime savings and bought all the monkeys.

They never saw Bond or Stock again - only monkeys everywhere...

The world's jungles are not just on the equator, they are wherever there is an offshore financial centre. They take good care of the megga rich (hiding their wealth in the likes of 'shell' accounts)but treat the rest of us like those villagers in this story.

The Isle of Man is an offshore financial centre that research has shown to be only 17% transparent in the way it does monkey business.

1 comment:

  1. The UK Treasury is now wrangling with the Isle of Man government over VAT revenue which could represent a loss in income to the government of between £90m and £140m a year or between 15% and 22% of the government’s annual income for the next two financial years!

    This is(financial) problem will most likely impact on the lives of ordinary decent Manx people rather than the elite hierarchy of the Island’s over paid civil servants

    Given the amount of money paid to public servants such as Mr. John Aspden (£250.00.00/year) a complete change in government, to be replaced with a quarter of the number of bureaucrats with halved (at least) salaries will go a long way towards absorbing the government’s loss.

    Once the present government is out of the way the Islanders can set about restoring the good name of the Island as a financial centre - rebuilding it as a reliable, trustworthy place for the world community to invest/deposit money.

    Admittedly after the shenanigans of the last few years this may take some doing, but what was achieved once before can surely be achieved again.

    Let the Manx people flourish in a mood of happiness, self respect and honesty.
    The island is a really wonderful place – but it desperately needs to be rid of a few bad apples.

    ReplyDelete