Income Tax would destroy Cayman

Our local rulers’ much-publicised proposal to impose a tax on income generated by non-Caymanians may already have put Cayman onto a slippery slope from which there is no escape. I don’t think the proposal will be implemented, but the very suggestion is scaring the bejesus out of our tax-haven professionals and their clients, and amusing those international publications that have heard of it.

The proposal is irresponsible in the extreme, and betrays an alarming ignorance of what makes tax-havens tick. Our professionals are all aware of the danger posed by that ignorance. They also know how irresolute the British Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) is in the face of bluster from our local politicians. One can well imagine that the professionals have some good emergency plans in place.

I don’t think Britain wants to see the end of Cayman’s tax-haven; it is too valuable an asset to British commercial interests. However, there may be other factors in play that haven’t been disclosed. For all we know, Britain is planning to do what it did to Diego Garcia and turn Cayman over to the Americans. The last thing the US would want is de-facto independence in islands so close to its naval base in Cuba. You never know!

The income-tax proposal and the political rhetoric that accompanies it have whipped the vocal minority of Cayman’s xenophobes into a frenzy of anticipation. Taxing expats’ income is wonderful news for the “stick it to the expats” crowd. All the same, Work Permit foreigners would be wise not to rush to the exits just yet. Yes, they should quietly sell their houses and apartments, if they can, and shift all their long-term savings out of Cayman. (Expats on Work Permits are damn fools if they buy property here anyway, even without the latest threat.) But there’s no need to panic, just yet.

Even the bare bones of the proposal – a tax on wages and directors’ fees and the like – would take a long time to implement. Government’s legal draughtsmen lack expertise in their job, and competence. Has there ever been a Caymanian law that didn’t need amending within three weeks of its passage? No there hasn’t. A new tax-collection bureaucracy would take some time to organise. It can’t piggy-back on the existing procedure that collects pensions-contributions, as has been suggested.

More than in any other place I can think of, a new tax law would need to take account of the strength of the resistance. Cayman is an island of tax-dodgers, after all. Tax-haven professionals in every tax-free jurisdiction run rings around their counterparts in the tax offices of the world’s major nations. Unless it could recruit some experienced poachers and turn them into gamekeepers, Cayman’s tax-collection agency would stand no chance at all.

Also, ours is a business culture that is steeped in secrecy. Giving tax-office clerks the authority to inspect individual and corporate bank and brokerage accounts is out of the question. Even if it were to happen, much taxable income would be quickly redesignated as non-taxable – bonuses or consultancy fees paid into overseas accounts, for instance. Or, “exempted” companies would be utilised, of the kind used by Offshore clients. Would the tax-inspectors demand to see the bank accounts of every exempt company? Not if the Offshore sector were still in operation, it wouldn’t.

The taxing of expats’ remuneration would only be the beginning, of course. Caymanians’ wages etc would be next, then everybody’s dividends, then corporate profits. Government’s extravagances – the root cause of all our fiscal problems – will never end until the FCO calls our politicians’ bluff and takes direct taxation off the table.

It may be too late to act, even this early. Cayman’s Offshore haven has a lot of momentum, and will take a lot of stopping. But if anything can do it, it’s the prospect of a tax on income and profits.

Could these be the last Olympic Games?

Ah, the thrill of the sprints! But oh, the boredom of the national anthems! Surely even Americans are embarrassed with all the hype when the Imperial anthem is played for the hundredth time, and the hundredth American flag is paraded up and down the arena. Don’t we yearn to hear the anthem of the Falkland Islands or Liechtenstein, just once? Well, maybe this will be China’s year - who knows?

The whole Olympic spectacle is a celebration of tribal values. Maybe it always was. History records the names of some of the individual winners at the ancient Games – but rarely of the city-states that sponsored them. Did the states bask in the reflected glory of the winners? Maybe they did. Human nature can’t have changed much.

Maybe today’s offensive chants of “USA! USA!” were “Spart-ah! Spart-ah!” three thousand years ago. Then as now, maybe the Games tended to unite the factions within each winner’s nation while stressing the inferiority of each loser’s. “We’re number one! We’re number one!” If China wins enough medals we will get sick of the cry, “Zhongguo! Zhongguo!” (“China!” in Chinese).

Hypocrisy is the theme, and always was. Individual athletes are encouraged to be kind to one another, while their families back home elect (or at least obey) psychopaths bent on slaughtering the families of certain other athletes. For the duration of the Games, the audiences show remarkable tolerance towards athletes who wrap themselves in the national flags of the most brutal of nations. It doesn’t make sense.

The 2012 Games are especially hypocritical. Some commentators have pointed out the similarities between the militarism of these and the 1936 Berlin Games, when it was Germany that was on the prowl for war. Were the armed forces of Germany as involved as the armed forces of Britain are today? In 1980 when Russia was “The Evil Empire”, were the Games as militarised as now?

The British Army will be using the Games to experiment with civilians as human shields. Who ever thought we’d see rocket-launchers sited on blocks of flats in East London, to be fired at attackers – or imagined attackers? That sort of thing is a War Crime when it’s done in Syria, isn’t it? Ah well, all together now: “Ingerland! Ingerland!”

I have a dream, that Olympic athletes will one day again compete as individuals, with no flags and no anthems to bore us. It may seem perverse, but I would prefer commercial sponsorships than national. Coca-Cola may ban the wearing of Pepsi shirts by audience-members (which it does, in London); but at least there is no Coca-Cola Tribe whose President will be firing rockets into the villages of Pepsi loyalists during the running of the marathon. No Ford Tribe will be invading the homes of Dodge loyalists and raping their wives during some of the medals presentations. National sponsors, however...

The Games’ organisers are being criticised for accepting sponsorship from Dow Chemical, because one of its products (Agent Orange) was used to mutilate millions of Vietnamese children during one of America’s past invasions. Well, Dow Chemical is a nasty company with a nasty ethic. But let’s be fair: Agent Orange only became a means of mass mutilation when it was dropped from US planes piloted by so-called war-heroes commanded by psychopaths both military and political.

There aren’t all that many producers that don’t benefit from military ventures one way or another. My father accidentally made a modest fortune when wool rose in value during the West’s invasion of Korea in the 1950s. The soldiers needed warm clothes in the Korean winters, and it made sense for him to shear the wool off his sheep and sell it. I don’t say Dow Chemical is quite as innocent as he was, but the principle is the same.

Amnesty International and the CIA

I signed a new Will the day before we flew to Norway last month. If the plane had gone down the Will probably wouldn’t have been enforceable anyway, but you never know. Linda and I own all our assets as joint tenants with right of survivorship, and as the older I would have been presumed to have died first, absent any evidence to the contrary. Linda’s Will would have been in effect, not mine. Nevertheless...

The last-minute change I made was to disinherit Amnesty International. I know, I know: it’s a fine organisation with a proud record of battling for political prisoners around the world, including those in Guantanamo and Bagram and all the other US and NATO torture-camps.

Until now. Now, change is in the offing. Earlier this year, the US State Department parachuted one of its trained stooges into the top job at Amnesty’s US branch. According to Wikipedia, she advocates a program of military intervention as a way of promoting democratic agendas all over the world – presumably as defined by the US State Department. (Sometimes, you have to destroy a country in order to save it, right?)

Amnesty will continue to do good work, but now "good work" will be what the State Department says it is. Amnesty's agenda will be set by the CIA, which is the Department’s military wing. We can imagine how the agenda will change: political prisoners in Iran and Syria, OK: in Israel and Saudi Arabia, not so much. There will be a shift in the organisation’s priorities, as there was at Human Rights Watch, where the appointee worked last. That body became increasingly regarded as a CIA front during her time there.

What an appalling betrayal of trust those takeovers represent! We had Amnesty down to receive a third of our assets – a serious commitment on our part. What should we do now? Our own family gets first dibs on our savings, when we die, but we have never believed its members should receive the whole kit and caboodle.

So, as long as the Salvation Army remains uncorrupted, we will gladly give it the money instead. Will the Salvos ever be suborned by national rulers who believe that mutilation and slaughter of foreign civilians are actions to admire? We can’t imagine the Salvos’ good works would ever be compromised by national or tribal considerations, the way Amnesty’s and Human Rights Watch’s have been or will be.

One-time bequests to charities are easy enough to arrange; an extra paragraph in a Will is all it takes. Permanent and complex Foundations are fine for the super-rich, who don’t mind paying super-lawyers to set them up and administer. Those are the ones we all read about in newspapers and books – Ford, Rhodes, Templeton, Rockefeller, Gates, and many others not quite so famous. Most of them bring super-benefits, whether tangible or intangible, to large numbers of people in different parts of the world.

Incidentally, there is even a Ken Dart Foundation, not so well known but easily found on Google. It sponsors, among other things, the internationally involved Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma, thereby encouraging the kind of fighters for freedom that Amnesty made its name defending.

Those native Caymanians who are forever bad-mouthing Ken Dart for not giving away more local freebies than he does, in this richest of all Caribbean islands, should give the man respect for his Foundation’s work. Don’t let Cayman’s entitlement-culture blind any of us to the needs of the rest of the world.

The weather in Norwegian (foreign languages)

Our granddaughters in Norway have received their annual English lesson, and this time they didn’t even have to leave home. Our son lives in a modest hytte (shack) thirty minutes from Oslo, and they were staying with him the whole two weeks we were there recently. We, for our part, got our annual lesson in Norwegian – though a less productive exercise would be hard to find.

Mainly, it’s because we don’t try hard enough. English is the language of the world, and the girls will have to learn it sooner or later. Their new little brother, too, though he doesn’t even speak Norwegian yet. Forty or fifty years ago, daily exposure to a foreign language would have driven us (Linda and me) to learn it, but we’re too old now.

The Norwegian grammar is much like the English, and while the vocab is unfamiliar it’s not as foreign as, say, Chinese or Arabic. I’ve learned not to call a hytte a hut, unless it’s a basic overnight refuge for cross-country skiers; otherwise, it’s a cabin – or, if it doesn’t have running water, a shack. Ross’s is a shack – no disrespect.

When I hitch-hiked through Scandinavia in my distant youth, I lucked into a short-term job in a farm-home for autistic children in Sweden, and picked up just enough Swedish to get by. Even today I can still read Swedish sub-titles on the TV more easily than Norwegian ones. Watching the weather in Swedish is therefore more informative for me than it is in Norwegian. Swedish words have always seemed closer to English, although that may be attributable to which dialects I’ve been exposed to and which not.

Only in recent times have the coastal villages (viks) of Norway been connected by road. The only means of access used to be by sea – good practice for the Viking raids on the coasts of the British Isles and Normandy in centuries past. Roads and television have lessened most of the dialectal differences.

We met the other grandparents of the baby at a birthday party for his cousin. They struggled manfully to converse with us, but the language barrier was too great; we gravitated naturally to the few cousins and uncles who could speak English. Actually, our presence was a social strain on several levels. Our son had done their daughter wrong (!), and was not invited. The language barrier was probably a mercy. (He did crash the baby’s Naming Day, under cover of a human shield comprising his daughters and their mother. That showed prudent family-planning, in a sense...)

It’s always embarrassing, being caught short linguistically. The girls chatter happily with their dad and his girl-friend in Norwegian, but courtesy demanded that they speak English in our presence. A few years ago I took a Berlitz course that was poorly taught and utterly useless. Be warned: Berlitz courses aren’t designed for conversation with young grandchildren. So, we have to pick up bits and pieces as we go.

People whose native language is English are so lucky! There will usually be someone who speaks it, everywhere in the world – on the beaten track, at least. If not one’s fellow grandparents, at least some of their relatives; if not one’s grandchildren, at least their mothers; if not one shopkeeper, then the next one along the row. (My travel tales on this blog, T1 to T10, illustrate the kind of problems encountered off the beaten track.)

To compensate for our failure to speak foreign languages, Linda & I carefully avoid using English slang and colloquialisms, and try to use perfect grammar. We recognise a duty to make ourselves clearly understood in English; it’s the least we can do.

The domestication of men

They used to call it “the seven-year itch”. After seven years of marriage, in the days when marriage was “till death do us part”, men were statistically most likely to stray from the conjugal bed and take up with other women. Such affairs were usually temporary. Usually the other woman was left in the lurch when papa remembered his obligations to his wife and kids, or perhaps the financial cost of divorce. As Marilyn Monroe famously sang in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,
He’s your guy when stocks are high, but beware when they start to descend – 
For that’s when the louses go back to their spouses. Diamonds are a girl’s best friend! 

Judging by the world’s three billion women, as a species they seem to be programmed to bear children and nurture them; the world’s three billion men are designed to sire children and ignore them. Women’s instinct seems to be to need families and a life that doesn’t threaten the welfare of their children; men’s is to seek companionship and a life that doesn’t interfere with that.

I’m well aware that a few millions of both sexes have progressed beyond such instincts. Good for them; but I’m writing about the vast majorities. Ethical concepts such as individual freedom and the perceived right to choose the way one lives are historically recent – and of limited application outside the Western system of governance. If that’s so, how and why did the two sexes reach a compromise in the Western system?

In other words, how did Western men become domesticated, in defiance of their sex’s contrary instincts and tradition? Why do they stay with their wives and kids despite their seven-year itches? And even when they don’t stay, in the advanced Western culture of serial monogamy and divorce, why do fathers (more often than not) keep in touch with their children?

After seven years of marriage there are, on average, two or three young children underfoot who divert their mother’s attention from the man in her life. If she wants to keep him and his financial support, and he wants her to stay active and attractive, she has little option but to become his slave – just as she would be in all the other cultures throughout human history. Oh yes, there’s been a queen here and an influential courtesan there, and Joan of Arc..., but the mass of women have always led lives of quiet desperation far greater than the mass of men could ever comprehend. They still do.

Except in the Western world – and even in it, sometimes – women have to leave their homes and families and move to the homes and families of the men who have bought and paid for them. Is it their fathers who oblige them to do that, or their mothers? Their fathers, almost certainly. When they (the sold-and-bought women) produce children, they give them up to their men’s clans or tribes, to live in peace or war at the discretion of those clans or tribes.

Traditionally, a man’s clan or tribal duties include providing children to his clan’s or tribe’s inventory of males – cannon-fodder for war or defence. The taboo of incest may well have originated when clans first noticed the physical debilitation of the children of siblings. Maybe, too, the practice of female infanticide originated as a means of depriving rival clans of breeding stock.

I’ve long puzzled over why Western women – so liberated and sophisticated, relative to their sisters in the Third World – don’t kick up more of a fuss about their children going off to unnecessary wars. Having carefully nurtured their babies through all the dangers of childhood, how can mothers send them off to die for the supposed honour of the community? It doesn’t make sense, except in terms of an atavistic submission to their lords-and-masters’ tribal instincts. The child of a slave-woman is also a slave. That was and is the rule in chattel slavery – a rule that may have begun right back with the very first tribes of pre-history.

Clean sheets (T 10 - Iraq 1960s)

(This is the tenth of my travellers’ tales for my grandchildren. Iraq, January 1965) 

We had reached the street when the landlady called us back. “Oh, all right”, she said. “I’ll give you fresh sheets, you cheeky young buggers.” “For the same price?” “Yes, yes, of course for the same price!” So we went inside again and watched while she re-made the bed with freshly washed sheets and pillow-cases. Not particularly clean, but un-slept-on since they had last been bashed on rocks in the local stream. No black hairs from last night’s occupant, for instance.

She had been indignant at our indignation. “But these sheets are fresh! They’ve only been on the bed for ten days, for goodness sake.” She held out her hands for me to count her fingers. The conversation was all in fluent Arabic, at least on her side. We had long ago learnt the words for “clean sheets”, and I figured out what the ten fingers meant and signified. She made a mistake mentioning the ten days, though actually it was the greasy black hairs on the pillow that lost her the argument.

We were chums again, and I paid her in advance for the night’s lodging. We reckoned it wasn’t bad value for fifty cents. It wasn’t even the worst accommodation we’d had in our travels. What we referred to as The Bridal Suite had been pretty dreadful, in some other town along the way. It was a room with walls made of brown paper – scraps of varying shapes and sizes held together with sticky tape, from floor to ceiling on three sides with a concrete wall on the fourth. It was designed to give the most basic privacy for the rare married couple on a trip.

That “most basic” had been debased a great deal since it had been first constructed. Every male who ever rented a bed in the dormitory beyond the brown paper had poked a hole in the brown paper in hopes of catching a glimpse of female flesh. Linda swore she saw eyes peering in through the holes, and maybe she did. Good luck to them; we slept fully clothed. In those parts of the Third World, very few women stayed at public inns. The only customers were men, who all slept in the one room. Only rarely did we get a room to ourselves.

Our overnight beds were usually pretty crappy, even by the standards of the Middle East. We were travelling poor, after all. Maybe it was our insistence on clean (fresh) sheets that kept us healthy. Never in all our travels did we encounter bed-bugs.

Never, either, did we feel in the slightest danger in our sleeping quarters. We were foreign backpackers in places that had (mostly) never seen backpackers – or foreigners of any kind. The people in each slum relished the chance to exercise their traditional hospitality towards strangers who came in peace.

They jostled for the privilege of leading us to places to stay and cafes to eat at, followed us into the kitchens while we chose our food, and watched us eat it. And as often as not, bought us tea afterwards and exuded goodwill. (These are the people whose children and grandchildren our Western soldiers are slaughtering, now; you can guess whose side Linda and I are on.)

Naturally, they wondered what on earth we were doing there, and speculated freely among themselves. But they had no way to ask us, nor we to tell them. We could manage only the smallest of small talk, with much waving of hands and regular reference to the basic translation-dictionary I’d bought in London. They probably wondered about that.

The only book many of them had encountered would have been the Koran, and they knew this wasn’t that! One way or another, the book and the hand-gestures and body-language must have covered the cultural gaps, and generated inter-cultural goodwill. One way or another, we always got fresh sheets when we asked for them. In the end.

A parliament of fools (Cayman politics)

The big event on our local political calendar next month is the referendum on single-member constituencies. Largely, it’s a waste of time and effort. Our unpopular ruling party (UDP) is against the proposal on the grounds that single-members might cost it the next election; our almost-as-unpopular opposition party (PPM) is begging for a YES vote for the identical reason.

Until now, only our two smallest settlements have elected one MLA each – East End and North Side. Cayman Brac elects two, Bodden Town three, George Town four, and West Bay four. Overseas readers will be amused to know that Cayman’s 15,000 voters elect a mini-parliament of fifteen MLAs – AND that we are soon to get three more, thanks to 1) local lobbying by political cronies anxious to jump on the gravy train and 2) cowardly appeasement by our colonial masters in London.

If one of the additional seats is allotted to each of the largest three electorates, and if the single-member referendum fails, the voters of West Bay and George Town will be invited to tick up to five names each in next May’s general election.

At a time when the rest of the world is cutting back on government bureaucracies, Cayman will add three or four or five new departments, fully staffed and office’d at an annual cost of several million dollars in salaries, family pensions, family medical expenses, family credit cards and family travelling expenses local and international. Government’s annual Budgets are in deficit already, so the money will all be borrowed, and the loans be repaid out of future Public Revenue. If there is enough of it.

One of my early childhood friends and schoolmates later represented 100,000 voters in the Australian Parliament, in an electorate of almost 300,000 square miles. Every two or three years he campaigned the length and breadth of an area slightly larger than Texas, seventy times the size of Jamaica and three thousand times the size of Cayman. (The electorate was Maranoa; check it out on Wikipedia, in case I got my figures wrong.) Yet Caymanians reckon they need eighteen elected representatives in their one hundred square miles and 15,000 voters. Sigh. What a joke.

Our MLAs divide themselves into two teams of bloodline-Caymanian chums and cronies drawn from a tiny gene-pool. Personal popularity is everything; there are no policy-differences at all. Both teams indulge freely in anti-expat rhetoric. Back in 2003, pressured by Britain to reduce the backlog of citizenship applications, the ruling team of the day in effect signed blank certificates and scattered them like confetti to expats deserving and undeserving. The anti-expat lobby reacted with fury, so the rulers introduced a seven-year residency limit for working expats. Alas! Too little, too late.

The Lobby swung its support to the other team, which, in power in 2005, back-dated the “rollover” period and implemented an ethnic-cleansing exercise of thousands of expat domestic workers domiciled here for up to twenty-five years. Alas! Too much, too late.

There were just enough new expat citizens to vote their benefactors back in, in 2009. The open question now is whether the same factors will be in play next year. Will the irresponsible governance of the slightly-less anti-expat gang be forgiven by the beneficiaries of the confetti-scattering of 2003, or will the latter hold their noses and vote for the gang supported by Cayman's xenophobes?

Unless a large number of independent candidates emerge, courageous enough to defy the anti-expat Lobby, Cayman will enter yet another four-year period of irresponsible governance. God help us, then!

Locking the doors and windows (crime in Cayman)

When Cayman’s criminal gangs first began to get out of hand, we began locking all the doors and ground-floor windows when we left the house, and at night. Later, we locked them when we were home upstairs. Later still, we locked the upstairs windows, too, at night. We promised ourselves that if burglar-bars ever became necessary it would be time to leave Cayman. We couldn’t see ourselves living behind barred windows. What kind of life would that be?

And yet, now, today, here we are living behind barred windows and double-locked doors. We got used to it. But what will we have to do next, to protect ourselves and our property? No cutlasses or kitchen-knives, I think. We’re not skilled in their use. The average home-invader, fresh from his gang’s self-defence training, would take five seconds to disarm me of my weapon – and would be all the more angry for my disrespect. There is no advantage in making an invader angry. It doesn’t seem to do any good anywhere else in the world.

(When I started on my travels with Linda in the Near and Middle East as a young man, I used to carry a knife in a sheath on my belt, thinking it might be a disincentive to prospective muggers. A fellow traveller told me that in the areas I was headed for a knife was more of a provocation, and that if my skills in a knife-fight were inferior to a challenger’s I could end up dead. That made sense. Thereafter, my protection was a rolled umbrella with a rough-edged point. Umbrellas aren’t threatening, and they’re useful walking-sticks. And, I did once brandish it while chasing a mugger who had snatched Linda’s handbag; I didn’t catch him, but he dropped the bag!)

There is an ongoing debate in Cayman over whether residents should be licensed to keep guns at home. Or maybe just citizens. Or citizens with clean Police records. Or citizens vouched for by our local politicians. Oh, but whoa! That’s how political gangs begin, isn’t it? Huh. I would trust myself to choose wisely, and those of my friends wise enough to trust me; but nobody else. Some gun- advocates want four-dollars-an-hour security-guards to be armed, in order to discourage robberies of shops and banks. If that ever comes into law, the very least the guards should do is hold up their employers for more money. Four dollars an hour is less than a Minimum Wage would be if we had a Minimum Wage.

What about policemen? Some policemen are armed already, though we don’t see them waving pistols around in public. Given the frequency with which police officers are involved in traffic accidents, they might be less dangerous with guns than with cars, or cellphones. That woman police officer who drove straight through the Elgin Avenue roundabout the other week, presumably while texting – would she have been any more dangerous if she’d been loading her gun while driving? Surely not.

As for armed householders – well, unless we’re going to be walking around the house with loaded guns stuck in our waistbands (and the workplace, and the supermarket, and the restaurant), and sleeping with them under our pillows, what protection will they provide? All a bad man has to do is point his gun at you through your barred window and say, “Open the door by the count of three or I’ll kill you. One, two, three.” Once inside he steals your guns and ammo and sits with you while his colleague takes your debit-card down to the ATM.

Of course that would only happen once or twice, before all the expats put their families onto planes to somewhere else. Maybe the victim’s neighbours would form a vigilante posse and search every place the invader might be hiding. But how many of them would be seen off by other armed householders? Many many, that’s how many. Ridiculous.

“No Income Tax in Cayman”

As we know, who live here, Cayman has a relatively high international profile. Among Offshore tax-havens we are certainly in the top ten most-recognised, and in some categories in the top five. Financial scandals keep our name alive everywhere – in newspapers, novels and movies, in comic strips and late-night talk-shows. Cruise-ship tourists wear T-shirts that read “I have a secret bank account in the Cayman Islands.”

In my early days here, my mother once passed on a warning from a friend of hers, that Gordon had better keep his wits about him, among all the crooks over in Cayman. The friend was a big wheel in Lloyd’s of London, and when that scandal broke in the late 1980s he found himself among a whole bunch of crooks over in London – well-bred and well-spoken, but crooks by any standard. As for Cayman’s clients: most big-time crooks have the sense to lose themselves in big-city crowds, rather than stick out like sore thumbs in small-town communities like ours.

Most of the world’s professional politicians have secret accounts in one Offshore haven or another, and we get our proportional allocation. But we don’t elect those politicians, or license their lawyers, and we don’t register any bank whose parent company isn’t already registered somewhere else. Barclays, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, Santander, Bank of Tokyo, Bank of China... not many of those are owned by Caymanian fishermen or taxi-drivers – or our bankers or accountants, come to that.

Outside the world of Offshore business, though, our tax-regime is not well known. Last month, as an idle exercise, I posted four very short (100-300 words) articles in the Cayman Islands sections of four international forums that I subscribe to. Three of the essays were titled “No Income Tax in Cayman” or similar and, the other, “Britain’s favourite tax haven”. Each post received as many hits in a week or ten days as any of my other posts had received in six weeks! (Those other posts were on topics such as Working in Cayman, Retiring in Cayman, and Doing Business in Cayman.) The numbers weren’t high, since Cayman’s sections are not frequented nearly as much as other places. But our absence of Income Tax sparked the interest of casual visitors.

We forget how lucky we are, much of the time. We also forget to honour the people and companies who set up the tax-haven back in the late 1960s, including (yes, this is true!) the British Government and its Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO). All of the promoters did it for their own selfish reasons, but selfish reasons are what drive most economic development. Once established, the tax-haven has been kept alive for the best part of fifty years, by expat professionals, FCO clerks, and local politicians – all acting selfishly while benefitting every resident of Cayman.

The runaway success of our tax-haven brought so much money into government’s coffers that a tax on wages has never been genuinely needed. Yes, our local rulers (politicians and Civil Servants) have spent Public Revenue like drunken sailors, and have borrowed to fund their extravagances. They would like to tax wages, and the FCO has strongly urged that they do; but they are well aware of what happened the last and only time that was tried. That attempt, by our Cabinet-equivalent in 1987, was routed by a ferocious outcry from voters mobilised by our Chamber of Commerce, of all people. We should honour them, too, whose efforts have kept any kind of tax on individual remuneration at bay for 25 years, and counting.

It is the Chamber of Commerce that has also kept Cayman free of any kind of tax on business profits. Government’s bureaucracy plays merry hell with the private sector’s productivity and profitability, but there is a line in the sand that it dare not cross.

Stoned in Alexandria (T 9 - CZ & Egypt 1965)

(The ninth of my travellers’ tales, from March 1965)

We had talked our way out of Egypt with slightly forged currency-exchange slips (see the January 2012 post T-4) and out of Bulgaria with non-exportable local currency notes (March, T-6), and those successes must have gone to my head. But asking Czech border guards to let us cross into East Germany without an entry visa seemed reasonable enough on the face of it; a couple of months later the same sort of trick got us out of East Germany at Checkpoint Charlie (December 2011, T-1).

But this first time, two things worked against us. First, one of the guards spoke fluent English; second, we had way too much time to spare. Live and learn, I know, but the learning isn’t always much fun. I walked into the border-post with quiet confidence, and was carried out (figuratively speaking) like one of Muhammad Ali’s bum-of-the-month victims.

The English-speaking guard was friendly but disbelieving. “We can’t let you through without a visa. And we can’t issue you one. You will have to go back to Prague and get one from the East German Consulate there.” “Well, I’m terribly sorry,” I grovelled. “I thought we could get one here. It’s too late for Prague. The consulate will be closed for the weekend, and our visa for Czechoslovakia expires at midnight tonight. So, can you let us through, please?”

“No, I’m afraid I can’t," he chuckled. "You certainly can’t stay in this country with an expired visa. You can’t get to West Germany from here [I forget why], so what you have to do is drive to Vienna and buy a visa there. There's no other option.” I pulled out my map and measured the distance to Austria. “But it’s 200 kilometres away,” I said. “We’ll never make it in time!” He smiled and checked his watch. “Oh, I’m sure you will,” he said, “if you start right now...” Ugh! I had just enough sense to know that I was beaten – and I had no time to spare.

In the end, we made the Austrian border with twenty minutes to spare, after a nuisance delay by soldiers at a roadblock a few miles out. Westerners speeding towards the border a bit before midnight? Highly, highly, suspicious. In those days it was not unknown for young Westerners to try to smuggle refugees out in their cars. Even VW Beetles had enough room for somebody small and thin, buried under clothing in the front luggage area. Machine guns pointed at us from two feet away conveyed a clear message.

They checked every inch of the car while I explained the innocence of our mission to young conscripts who spoke and understood only Czech. For a shy farm boy brought up in a world without hand gestures, I had learned how helpful they were. In later years, my mother used to beg me to stop waving my arms around when explaining something.

Looking back, the Communist Menace was probably always exaggerated, just as the Islamic Menace is today. Linda and I travelled by car through every Communist-run nation in Europe except Albania. We hitched and bussed through nine Moslem nations plus the Turkish enclaves in Cyprus. Only on one single occasion on our travels did we feel genuinely threatened.

On that occasion, we got lost in a residential labyrinth in a poor area, and an impromptu gang of youngsters in Alexandria, Egypt began throwing stones at us. We represented the European invaders of 1956, to the uneducated stone-throwers - just as today, innocent Afghan wedding parties represent the bombers of the Twin Towers, to uneducated Americans.

An older boy happened upon the scene and led us to safety. And if he hadn’t come along, somebody else would have done. Egyptian cities are very crowded places. The mother of one of the kids would have slapped some sense into them, I expect. We weren’t ever in mortal danger, though it was a bit scary. Served us right for intruding, really. We had pushed our luck, which is always a mistake.