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If any jurisdiction should have been well placed to predict a banking collapse one would expect it to be the Isle of Man.
Within recent memory the Isle of Man has experienced the debacle surrounding the failure of the Savings and Investment Bank (SIB) which caused untold misery not just to external depositors but also to local people of comparatively modest means, whose savings were wiped out.
The Island responded by putting regulation in place and establishing a banking supervisory body (The FSC). Periodically over the years as organisations such as the Celtic League and Mec Vannin have criticised the financial services sector the government has trumpeted its faith in the systems that were in place. We have, they said, a well regulated mfinancial system.
With the failure of Kaupthing Singer and Friedlander (IOM) we now know that those systems failed. Let us be clear on this. Whilst some local authorities in the United Kingdom had started to worry about the stability of KSF (and other Icelandic banks) and transfer their funds regulators both in Mann and the United Kingdom were apparently happy to let those banks continue to operate. This hardly smacks of a smoothly functioning regulatory regime.
Bizarrely, a back-bench member of the House of Keys has had to gather signatures from colleagues to demand 'more information' about the failed bank. One would have hoped that the Manx government itself would have taken the initiative within hours of the crash and pledged that all information would be placed in the public domain as soon as was practical.
The make-up and effectiveness of Financial regulatory bodies both in Mann and the UK should be the subject of serious scrutiny in the wake of this most recent banking crash. The public need to know what systems were in place to avoid such a crash, why they failed and who was responsible. Any whiff of prevarication or cover-up should not be countenanced.
Following the SIB crash for years distressed depositors periodically berated the Isle of Man and its government alleging that there had been conspiracy and cover-up. This time there should be no grounds for such allegations.
J B Moffatt Director of Information Celtic League 15/10/08
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