News about the Cayman Islands in the Foreign Press

Wednesday,  August 17, 2005

Cayman Islands an effective setting for offshore finance drama

DETROIT, USA: Detroit Free Press, August 15, 2005 – Author William Brittain-Catlin, a former investigator for Kroll Associates Inc., in “Offshore: The Dark Side of the Global Economy”, chooses to bring offshore finance into focus through the lens of the Cayman Islands.

The sun-soaked British dependency proves an effective setting for this dark drama, as Brittain-Catlin combines snippets of the Caymans’ seagoing past (Columbus, turtles and Blackbeard the Pirate) with its role in the collapses of companies such as Enron Corp.

In lean prose, the author captures the convoluted story of U.S. energy trader Enron in 20 pages and boils the fraud at Italian food company Parmalat down to nine. The summations create crisp snapshots on how multinationals funnel profits offshore even as they milk governments onshore.

Enron, for example, used hundreds of Cayman subsidiaries to slash its U.S. taxes and hide losses. The Houston-based company also used its clout, including a friendly connection to President George W. Bush, to keep the government from regulating energy-derivatives trading, he says.
Enron combined offshore freedom with the kind of onshore protection that prompted government bailouts of Chrysler Corp. and the entire U.S. savings and loan sector.

“The modus operandi for the corporation is to pass the cost of its losses onshore onto society and its taxpayers, while the corporation runs off with the profit and parks it offshore,” Brittain-Catlin writes.

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