 Well, good evening, everyone, and thank you very much for joining us. My name is Brian Sloan. I'm the acting chair of the Cambridge Social Legal Group, and I'm absolutely delighted to see so many people here for what is our second webinar of the term. I'm particularly delighted that we've got Mayhen Smith joining us all the way from the Cayman Islands. I'm sure she'll tell us it's not quite as nice as it sounds in some way, but I'm delighted that she's enabled to join us this evening. I'll let her introduce herself a little bit more, but she is a PhD candidate in sociology here at Cambridge and a member of Jesus College. We'll see from the bio that she circulated that she's had a wealth of experience in practice in this area. And no doubt that that has been a fundamental aspect of what led her to do her doctoral research. Before we get started, I'd just like to say a few thank yous. One is to Daniel Bates, my colleague in the faculty who's been instrumental in setting all of this up, and I'd also like to thank my colleagues in the Centre for Tax Law at Cambridge, particularly Peter Harris and Dominic Decoden for their support of this seminar. One final thing I'd like to do before we get on to the technical things is to say, well, if you have joined us via a mechanism other than the socio-legal group, I'm going to share a link in the chat so that you can sign up for our mailing list for news of future events. I think, May, you're going to speak for about 20 minutes, 20 to 30 minutes, and then we'll open up for questions. What we're going to do is to allow you to raise your hands when it gets the questions, and we'll then use the features of the software, hopefully, to be able to allow you to turn on your audio and ask your question verbally. If that doesn't work for any reason, there's also a Q&A feature whereby you can type your question for May, but we'll worry about that, I think, when we get to it. So, without further ado, I'd like to pass over to May and Smith to give her presentation on the repatriation of Offshore Finance to Onshore and National Legal Orders and the Cayman Islands Experience. So, thank you very much, May. Great. Well, thank you, Brian, for having me and thank you to the Social Legal Group for having this wonderful event online now. I thought I would begin with my background and how I got into this field, and then I'll start to talk about my research and how it developed and the methodology, the theory and the findings, and I'll profess it with the findings up front just in case you guys want the two-minute sort of elevator speech. So, I started actually as a tax collector in 2008, first as just a regular tax agent at the Canada Revenue Agency. So, there I worked on the phones for about a year and a half, answering tax calls from taxpayers from across Canada for electronic and business filing, benefit services, and sort of various tax questions, and I would talk to people about, you know, let's say about 20 people per hour on an average day. And so, I got to, you know, really talk to quite a few people across Canada about just tax in general. From there, I moved on to revenue collections as a tax collector for a few years, and I finished after about four and a half years in total, where actually most of our time was spent writing uncollectable tax debt. And Canada Revenue Agency managed that the collectors at the time spent about half, at least half their time, writing off tax debt that cannot be collected anymore, either because the money has been gone, the person's become bankrupt, or you can't find the money anymore or because it's out of reach. And that really piqued my interest at the time, and I realized that, you know, if we're spending our time writing off all this uncollectable tax debt, and, you know, when we weren't, we were going after plumbers and dentists and doctors who couldn't, you know, pay their tax debt, you know, but by the time we focused all our efforts on these sort of small amounts, you know, we could have gotten some pretty big fish. And so, the time I thought, you know, why don't we go look for the ultimate tax protester, the tax evader, and obviously there must be a tax haters. And so that's when I began my study during my undergrad to look at tax protesters. From there, I did a master's in communications in Canada at Simon Fraser on the Cayman Islands as an Oxford Financial Centre. And what I really did there was an anthropology, basically how it went from a maritime economy, there were seamen, there were fishermen, there were sailors, and that's rope makers, turtles, people like turtle 20, 30, 40 years ago, and how they went from that up until the 1960s to an Oxford Financial Centre. And what you realise is that, you know, there's politics involved in that around that time, a lot of colonies were becoming independent from mostly European rulers. And the Cayman Islands decided that it did not want to become independent of the UK. And so what the Foreign Office stood at the time was that it said, you know, if you want to become a remain part of us, you need to have your own viable economy. And so it gave the Cayman Islands the tools to develop as a banking centre. And sort of that sort of had, that and other reasons is how it developed as an Oxford Financial Centre. And so I write about that in a book chapter that I'll make available after this talk, along with another compilation of other books on offshore and elite centre and sort of the development of Oxford Financial Centre. There are a lot of historians who write about the development of Oxford Financial Centre, particularly the banking. There's one on the development of banking offshore through Barclays, in Oxford. And so that's another field in itself. During my time, during my time at my master's fieldwork, I spent about a year in the Cayman Islands, interviewing people. And I didn't really have that much success. I was able to interview a lot of people in the tourism industry. A lot of people working at the restaurants, bars, scuba divers, and dive masters because there's a lot of scuba diving down here. But I couldn't really get to the financial centre because they just weren't accessible. And it was just after the you know, 2008 financial crisis, there was a lot of talk about tax havens, and nobody really wanted to talk about, you know, sort of tax and the relation to tax in the Cayman Islands. It was the last thing you wanted to talk about. And so I realised when I did the history of the islands that a lot of people who founded the islands and, you know, key members who really developed the island were actually from Cambridge specifically. When you think of Maples and Calder, one of the best known law firms in the Cayman Islands, you know, John Maples is British and Douglas Calder is British. And they were both Cambridge, Illinois, and they met in Cambridge and they came down to Cayman and they developed Maples and Calder, which if you're not familiar with that name, was famously pointed out to by Obama at the Unglin House for having, you know, tens of thousands of registrations in one building. William S. Walker, the Walker's law firm, is now a very popular law firm down here. Also considered one of the founders of the offshore financial industry here and also a Cambridge alumni. And judges David Hayton of the Eastern Caribbean Supreme Court, who supports a lot of the products that offshore produces, particularly Purpose Trusts. They're very different from charitable Purpose Trusts, but this was called a commercial Purpose Trust, also from Cambridge. And so there was this connection. And I realised that if I really wanted to access these networks, I really had to go to the place to get to these networks. And so that's actually why I applied to Cambridge in order to access these people and these networks. And anecdotally, it worked, because within about five or six weeks of arriving in Cambridge in 2015, I was invited by the Cambridge Canadian Club to meet the Prime Minister of Canada, Trosten Trudeau, and only Oxford and LSE students at the Canada House and in a pub afterwards, where a group of us got to personally and Mark Carney, the Governor of the Bank of England and other people. And so it sort of began this pathway of realising that not only did these interesting networks work, but they may actually get me into the top echelons of the financial industry in the Cayman Islands. And so that sort of prefaces my start there. It took a while for me to figure out the methodology on how I'd study the Cayman Islands because of how sensitive people were. They were very conflicted in talking to people because there had been so many media publications about what they did and how they presented themselves. And so they were obviously quite on the defensive. And it was a challenging way to understand them as either elites or who were framing them as something the political economy might frame them as networks of power. And I realised that it only until I actually started doing fieldwork a year later, where I spent about 13 months in total there, that it was actually easier to break it down by industry. And there was a lot of hit or misses. I tried to sign up for as many of the local events as possible. I went to the Society of Trust and Estate Planners conferences. I went to as many industry conferences as I could or could afford to go to. These events are usually three days at the Ritz-Carlton where they cost about, you know, $500 a day, so about $1,500 per event. But you really got to talk to these practitioners. And so at first it was difficult because the language of each conference was very different. These were hedge funds, trust companies, captive insurance, bankruptcy insolvency and restructuring specialists. So when a hedge fund or Ponzi scheme, you know, happens like the Bernie Madoff case, for example, Bernie had a lot of assets in the Cayman Islands and so they're all defaulted and he went and bankrupt and liquidations happened. The lawyers in Cayman had to step in and take care of the unwinding of all these assets. And so while you think of the Cayman Islands as an offshore financial centre, you have to think of it as a centre much like London or New York, which has very distinct pockets of specialisations. And one of the things that people don't realise is that while banking was a very big part of these offshore centres, they're all now specialising in individual specialisations that they've become good at. And so there's a joke most people sort of didn't know about BDI that the Chinese word for companies is BDI. And so BDI is very well known for companies registrations, particularly with the Chinese and I think Russians. The Bermuda, for example, is very popular for re-insurance, which is the insurance of insurance companies. And so that's been a sort of specialisation. And then the Cayman Islands has become the largest domicile in the world for hedge funds and also for captive insurance, which I'll explain in a bit, but also for trusts, special purpose vehicles, and a place to do business that can't be a place to conduct transactions that aren't normally easily done in onshore jurisdictions. So I've gone off on a bit of a tangent, but I'll go to maybe a brief introduction on the Cayman Islands itself as to what it is and how big it is. So it's only about 250, sorry, 250 square kilometres. And it's a very small British overseas territory, so it's British. It's made up of three islands, Little Cayman, Cayman-Brack, and Grand Cayman, which is the primary island where most people are living in. And the population is about 60,000 people, with it split evenly between expats and locals. So there are about 30,000 expats, 30,000 locals, or 30,000 Caymanians. And that's based on statistics from their, you know, their population and statistics office. And so the Cayman Islands is unique in that it's all volcanic rock. And there was little arable land, and they couldn't do a lot of planting there. And so unlike Jamaica and other islands in the area, they didn't have a plantation economy, which meant that they didn't have slaves or as many slaves to operate on the land. And so that developed a different kind of culture compared to other places in that the racism and the slavery and the things that came with slavery weren't as pronounced as they were in other islands. And that sort of contributes to why it remained, of course, decided to remain an overseas territory at the time. The community culture and population were actually quite proud to have this British affiliation. And so really the other thing about the Cayman Islands is that it operates on a British system of government and law and British common law. Their highest court of appeal in the Cayman court system is the Privy Council in the UK, which is seen by Caymanians as the islands as advantageous and that ensures familiarity, stability, and particularly political protections afforded to those seeking this British system of rule and regulation. And then the other obvious feature is that it doesn't have a levy personal or corporate income tax. And so that makes it advantageous and attractive for many people to do these financial transactions down here. Stamp duty and other things. The cost of living here is quite high. I would say similar to London and Switzerland, if not slightly more. But that means that the kind of talent that you track down here and it's developed over the last one year. Whereas previously you could have attracted bankers and accountants who would do work that was low paying for, you know, average size or low paying companies. You can't do that as you developed to retain these these people. And so what you've noticed is that when I say these islands have become to specialize in certain financial products, you notice the financial products that they specialize in, re-insurance for Bermuda, companies registrations for BVI and hedge funds for Cayman, are all very, very expensive and very highly concentrated financial products, you know, billions and billions of dollars, which means the fees that these legal teams will take from them are going to be able to satisfy, you know, the quality and the caliber of talent that they're going to be able to retain in Cayman, but also draw from the UK and from Australia and other common law based countries with common law practitioners to the island. And so you see this culture of trying to do something in the financial industry that's both prestigious, advantageous and, you know, high paying enough to be able to satisfy the needs of people doing this type of work. I'm going to move on to a couple of areas that I've focused on. And I guess I forgot to go back to the goals now. So if you're done with this now and you want to know basically my findings is that I studied the Cayman islands based on the hedge funds industries, captive insurance industry. Captive insurance means the insurance that companies purchase on behalf of themselves. Basically, what it means is that if you're a nuclear power plant, or if you're a hospital, and you've got specialist insurance needs that regular retail insurers wouldn't either normally insure because it's an unusual high risk type of insurance in that they've got very little information on it, or when disaster hits, it's incredibly unprofitable to pay out. What you're going to do is you're going to group together with other offshore oil rigs, other nuclear power plant plants, or other hospitals to start your own private insurance group. And what you'll do there is that you'll pay these premiums and then you'll use these premiums to reinvest into whatever you want so that you can manage your own insurance and your own insurance products. And then the other thing I looked at was bankruptcy and solvency and restructuring. What happens when things go wrong in an offshore financial center? Do people follow global bankruptcy practices and what's expected when the Madoff case, for example, threw up everywhere? Did Cayman lawyers practice in a way that was expected by global bankruptcy norms and regimes? And they did. And so what I found amongst all these three groups was that basically they were practicing to a pretty high standard, but also what you're noticing was that they were forming these industries and these practices and passing these laws in Cayman where you can pass laws a lot more easily than in a larger jurisdiction. And that these laws were actually pretty good in that people in onshore jurisdictions were looking at these practices and these laws and the profits that were being generated by offshore and then copying and pasting basically bits of what they liked about Cayman law, EFI law, or remutable law, and then repatriating those laws back to their own individual home states or back to London. And so the three examples I'm going to talk about, or the two examples I'll talk about, is first in trusts. In the trust case, the charitable purpose trust has so much history attached to it from the Crusades. And that means that if you ever wanted to change a part of the trust, which is the concept of the trust, you wouldn't be able to do that in the UK without a significant pushback by entrenched and old school trust scholars. And so what was happening in this case was that basically people wanted commercial purpose trusts. And so in a regular trust situation, there's a settler, there's a beneficiary, and then there's a trustee. The settler is the person that puts the money into the, or the asset into the trust, so the trust is a black box. And then there's the beneficiary, the person that benefits from whatever gets put into that trust. And then there's the trustee who manages that. And so in the commercial situations, when there's no person as a beneficiary, maybe it's a company that's a beneficiary, there is no need for that type of, there were seen that there was no need for this type of traditional trust product because there were too many restrictions on them. And so eventually what happened was that a lot of them moved offshore for offshore solutions to offshore problems that just weren't regulatory ready for it. And so you see the creation of something called the Star Trust in the Cayman Islands, a Vista Trust in the British Virgin Islands, and Bermuda has something similar as well. But I'll talk about the Star Trust because it's a really interesting concept in that the Star Trust stands for special trusts, I can't remember the acronym, but basically it's a special purpose trust and it was developed by somebody named Anton Duckworth, who is also from Cambridge. And basically the idea was to turn the trust on its head. Anything you couldn't do with the trust, you could now do with this Star Trust. And of course there was a lot of pushback and you'll see that there was actually a bit of an academic debate between some British trust scholars and Anton and they were called the Star Wars. If you search that you'll see a couple of academic articles about it. And the interesting about that was that when it was introduced in any small country you can produce any law and pass it within a few days and that doesn't make, came unique. You know it was able to create some laws and pass it, but it doesn't mean people are going to uptake it. But the reason why this was taken up and the reason why this was so popular was because Cayman already had a base of bankers and sort of a financial industry. So that means they had the rich, the clientele with the money and the assets and the products and the problems that could have used this product, the Star Trust. And these problems don't arise as a result of people in the Cayman Islands meeting it. These problems arise because these global clients around the world go to Cayman practitioners and they say, we have this problem. And so Duckworth saw this problem and said, look, I'm going to design this thing that's going to help remedy a lot of these problems. And so 1997 comes around and he gets this law enacted. And some of the funny sort of debates about it went on to say, funny quote actually, I'll quote Matthews, which is our Trust Textbook from 2002. And they said the culture of that at the time was that law students learned two or three crisp sentences about the need for human beneficiaries, chuckled over a few so-called anomalous cases involving at parrots, sepular monuments and fox hunting and moved on. And so that was a 2002 thing about the Trust Textbook referencing to what Star Trusts were or purpose Trusts were. And so by and a few years later, you could see that Offshore was practicing with these Star Trusts to this popularity so much so that the textbooks had to rewrite themselves to acknowledge the power of these Purpose Trusts and say that now quote, non charitable Purpose Trusts or NCPs are big businesses. Many jurisdictions now recognize them by force of statute and that non charitable Purpose Trusts are perfectly valid in English law. The boot is now very much on the other foot and that's from Matthews and 2002 in the Trust Textbook. And so some textbooks have accepted that these Trusts do exist, but it's still not accepted by a lot of you know, staunch Trust scholars who think of them as traditional vehicles for traditional purposes or certain purposes. And so Hudson, I think it's Alistair Hudson, another Trust Textbook from 2017 that I think a lot of students read, calls it quote, sickening pantomime and a purely tax motivated sham. So there's still arguments about it and there's still people who disagree with it. But I mean if the proof is in putting them and people with these hedge funds and other products are using it, you can't deny the power of these these products. And so there is one example of this thing where you had this problem onshore clients coming to an offshore jurisdiction helping discover a solution and not only discovering it but practicing into power so much so that when I went to a trust conference, the Society of Trusts and State planners held the conference in every January in the Cayman Islands. They were introducing a new product, a foundations company or a foundations trust company. And the trustees were putting up their hands trying to figure out this new product was and it was designed by the same and implemented by the same guy, Anton Duckworth again. And they said, you know, I go to my Chinese clients and they're savvy. They don't want this new foundations product that Cayman is just legislated. They go, I want the Star Trust. Like what does this foundations company do for me? And this is not what I want. And so the other trustees were saying that, you know, this is the same problem we had when we introduced the Star Trust 20, 30 years ago. You know, you have to educate them and tell them, you know, what this does. And while they'll still continue using the Star Trust, you have to continually twin it with the offering of this other new product that we have. And so what you're seeing is that this full, what I call recursive cycle is happening in that, you know, there's a problem, there's a solution, and they're all legal solutions. And it's gone full circle in that now the norm is to use this particular offshore product. And I think that's been probably the most interesting find in that. And so when I discovered that I started digging into the other sort of financial products, a quick one is the asset backed securities market. And the need to use special purpose vehicles. An economic geographer named Thomas Vainwright in the UK wrote about this phenomenon. And basically, it was about the fact that asset backed securities needed a special purpose vehicle in order to do the transaction it needed to do. But because the laws in the UK or EU were so difficult, it was profitably, just not profitable or not usable. And so the people who had these products went offshore in order to access SPVs, special purpose vehicles, to do this transactions. And when they saw that it was becoming popular and profitable, it was actually onshore professionals in London who lobbied for use of this type of vehicle to have an exemption. And it became actually accepted or passed. And so in that article, you'll see that basically, again, a technical problem that was just too heavily regulated and offshore jurisdiction using it. And it becoming popular. And then having it basically grabbed and re imported or the best bits or the more successful bits back and onshore. The last example I'm going to talk about is captive insurance, which I think is a really interesting thing. And I mentioned it earlier. But basically, captive insurance is incredibly popular because it mostly medical malpractice captives. In the 19, I think, again, probably the 60s, the Harvard Medical Group was succumbed to quite a bit of medical malpractice increasing fees for its doctors, hospitals, nurses. And so at the time, captives was not a popular thing. And at the time, if you wanted to start your own captive insurance company, you were twinned or coupled with the the regular insurance laws. And so captives are very different from regular insurance products and that yourself ensuring yourself. And one of the big things that that was really stuck with captive insurance was that you had to to sell aside a lot of money for your captives. So you couldn't invest all the premiums that you can, you know, if you collected a million dollars in premiums, you could reinvest all that million dollars, you had to hold, you know, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 percent of siding cash in order to pay out any premiums. And the risk profile based on that made it unprofitable to have a captive insurance in the US. And so the Harvard Medical Group of hospitals approached Bermuda at the time and said, you know, we saw that you did an insurance product for nuclear power plants. We'd like to do a medical one. And so Bermuda said, no, because they found this type of thing too risky or just not in their best interest. And so the group approached Douglas Calder in the Cayman Islands. I spoke to him a few years ago. And he told me about the story from horses off. And he said that you know, came down, had dinner with them and posted to his health and they were off. And so it's the stories that you gather well in the Cayman Islands about these things that you read about that really were an individual interaction from the person that spawned this massive industry. And what you'll see now is that the Cayman Islands is the largest all in the world for captives by the number of captives. But when you go to these captive conferences as I had in the Cayman Islands and talk to other states, states compete individually now for captive captive business, that the dollar value of actually a captives is actually larger in Vermont of all places than in the Cayman Islands. So Cayman might host a larger number of captives, but Vermont hosts dollar value more. And that's sort of similar to this Delaware Cayman thing where, you know, the number of companies hosted in the Cayman Islands is quite high. But actually, if you look at Delaware, it's much higher. I think I'll stop here because I'm not sure how long I've been speaking for Brian and see if I can field any questions. I think it's been about 30 minutes. That's about right. Thank you very much for that. It's very difficult to show appreciation in these circumstances, but there was a huge amount to unpack there. And I'm just wondering whether I count as an old school and entrenched cross scholar, but perhaps we can get that later. So we're now going to attempt to have questions in light of that very stimulating presentation. So if you would like to indicate to me and to Daniel, whether you'd like to ask a question verbally or you can type it and we'll be able to read it out. Anybody would like to do either of those. Perhaps while we're warming up, can I just ask, when you talk to people there, are they pretty upfront about the suggestion that, well, what we're doing is avoiding tax. And that's fine because national tax regimes, you know, haven't caught up with us. Or is there an awareness that what they're doing is seen as unethical at least by some. I think that was the thing I found most difficult in that. If you ask them about how they felt about being, you know, labeled as a tax haven, they'd become really, you know, they wouldn't want to talk to you. They tell you to leave. But when I realized that actually, if you found interest in what they were actually doing, so, you know, how does, what's the history of the hedge fund? How did you form your first hedge fund here? How did you manage it here? What happened to your fund or the management of your fund during the financial crisis? They're more than happy to talk about the nitty-gritty details and technicalities of what they do. And so as long as you get a grasp of some of the key terms or key cases that they've, they may have worked on, or how key cases in the UK have affected how they work on these cases, they will talk to you for days about these things. And so I think it's the realization that these professionals are pretty proud of the work that they do. But tax is only gently related to all the things they do. It's sort of the last part of the benefit of doing business in offshore. And I think that's the sort of key message that they've been trying to get to the world. And of course, most people in the world don't agree with a lot of practices and that the end practice is that a lot of tax is deferred. But I've been, I tried to avoid that while I'm down here because it just, you hit a wall and you're never going to get a conversation like that. One of the more clever things that I've started to do is that over the last four years, I've been taking the best of the people that I found in the Cameron Islands and bringing them to Cambridge. And so they actually come to Cambridge annually in September to the Economic Crime Symposium that is hosted at Jesus College by Barry Ryder. It draws 1500 judges, lawyers, serious fraud offices, financial and teleconsumants from around the world who focus on anti-money laundering, terrorist financing. And so I have a couple of these Cayman panels and I put in provocative questions. I have the Cayman panel speak to the world criminal, economic crime prosecutors about what they actually do and give them an opportunity to have a go at it. So that's been working actually quite well in that they've loved the fact that they've got a forum to talk about the Cayman Islands in a pretty well thought-out manner. Thanks. That's really interesting. I think that actually leads us nicely to the first question that we've got in the Q&A panel, which is, Ruder Chitape, one thing to hear a bit more about your ethnographic methodology and process and how easy it was to get people to talk to you. So the process of ethnography, so I've actually been researching Cayman since actively since 2008 and it came down as a master's student. I had to affiliate myself with the local university college and that helped me quite a bit to get access to a lot of locals and to talk to people. But still, it didn't get me to the partners of all the taught law firms and that's what I was really interested in. I wanted to talk to the people who'd actually been in the Cayman Islands for 10, 20, 30 years over a couple of national crises and who actually led these firms to the world. To get to them, it helped significantly to have this Cambridge affiliation, but they also would judge you based on the first few minutes that they would talk to you. And so that means I had to develop a really strong language of understanding of whatever they did. So I had to do a lot of reading on trusts. I still know nothing about trusts, but I can at least articulate basic concepts of it and same thing with captives and sort of other things. I also attended a lot of industry conferences which helped them just see my face. It's a really small island and when they're used to seeing you around, they become more comfortable around you in these locations. The third thing I did was a very clever professor at Texas A&M has started this course and has been running it for about 14, 15 years called Offshore Financial Transactions where he brings his law students from Texas A&M to the Cayman Islands for a week for credit and he brings the people from the Offshore Financial Center in Cayman to present to these law students on exactly what they do. And so you're provided with these slides and PowerPoints and informal chats with people that I was trying to get access to and people who have fairly big names in the Cayman Islands. So that was actually a brilliant thing and this person Andrew Morris, the professor who's now dean there, has started the exact same course but with Jersey. So he brings his law students from America to Jersey every year now and he's been doing it for the last two or three years to talk to the financial industry there. So there's some really clever stuff out there. You just kind of have to find it but through that I was able to ask questions as a student because I signed up for this course and follow up with interviews and then through that networks. The other side project I've been working on is studying women in offshore to understand the experiences of women in an offshore financial center compared to women in metropolitan financial centers. An anthropologist named Melissa Fisher who's based in Copenhagen now has done the study on chikarmical delights of women in Wall Street over a 40-50 year period and so I thought I would do the same with that and through that I was able to interview them with that in mind but also about their experience as just a financial professional in Cayman. Okay great thanks you'll see now that we've got quite a few questions in the Q&A panel. Perhaps you could sort of summarize the question and then answer it if there were any of it. Yeah so Hans has talked about Bermuda so at the time Bermuda and I don't know a lot about the culture of Bermuda but if a hospital captive went to you in the 1960s or 50s or 70s and they said we have malpractice problems and we need to ensure ourselves it probably didn't sound palatable at the time and they probably wanted to move to a higher end or a nicer signing product for themselves and that is why they likely rejected rejected this hospital group but I suspect you know they may have been other reasons based on the Bermuda government at the time or what they wanted but but I do know that in an interview with William S Walker that I found in the archives he did explicitly state that you know Bermuda's you know mistake was our beef steak and so he's quoted in in one of those and also in his autobiography as well. A question from Marco Regi and I may you mentioned that Cayman had more profitable instruments and they're invented and offered to the business community almost every year how do you measure this profitability in terms of taxes saved so I measure it based on if it sinks or floats. Cayman's not going to offer anything that that doesn't the financial services industry is going to offer a product or service that isn't profitable because that's how they generate their income they don't generate income you know on performance of certain things they generate income on fees charged based on their specialist knowledge and their legal practices and so if a hedge fund makes a 10% profit for example that that profit doesn't triple to the practitioners in Cayman because the practitioners in Cayman's they're all administrators of these funds or these products so they they get paid based on you know setting up the company taking down the company you know or you know selling the company but not based on the performance of the fund itself they get paid based on administration on fees and so what you'll see when I interview people was that they actually make a lot of their money on setting up and you know taking down the fund so you know there's a life cycle or business cycle of any financial business or product and so they make their money there but between that they do private equity deals and so the the life of a private equity deal is pretty short I think three to five or ten years of that and so throughout the life of the deal there are different tranches for things that have to happen and when the Cayman lawyers are in part of that they make money through the the processes as it goes through the steps but not the performance of whatever happens. There are a few further up so I think Andy Summers for example has been waiting for a while to have his interview. Can you read it out because I can't see it. Sorry if you got it. Yep common reporting standards so Andy Summers what do you think has been the impact of common reporting standards on activities in Cayman and more generally what is the relation between business activities and personal wealth management as aspects of the Cayman avoidance evasion industry. So one of the most difficult places to study here at the moment for me and I'm not really focused too much on it is private banking and the people who manage family family wealth or they're called family businesses or something so I've not seen it yet and I've attended quite a few trust conferences here so I wouldn't be able to unfortunately report on that at the moment and the problem is that you can see trends from an outsider's point of view and you can see trends based on chatting on people but those trends are based on the type of work that they're engaged in so when I talk to all these practitioners for example a KPMG or PWC down here they can tell me that their their groups are shrinking or expanding for example after the financial crisis they had to expand their bankruptcy and insolvency practitioners groups and then they had to shrink it back down after five or six years and so you can measure it based on the expansion and the shrinking of certain groups within working groups within their businesses but to be able to figure that out is I think pretty pretty difficult um yeah so personal wealth management there are a lot here you can see it private jets here below but yeah how to measure it I'm still working on it I'd love to chat with you about that if you have further questions open questions Darren count the last financial crisis led the OSED to increase transparency and tax havens the financial sector is now being called on to help COVID-19 support will COVID-19 improve the image of tax havens I'm not sure in what respect but I know that for a fact that anybody who's got you know a major pension fund here sorry a major pension fund in your home country is likely going to have used or used a Cayman entity one of the guys I interviewed said you know the Ten Commandments of the hedge fund was to open up a domicile on the Cayman Islands it was just a good business good business um you know Hacumen at the time and it still is because it's it's it's a they've got our team of specialists who've been doing it for 20 or 30 years and so Cayman has a really interesting specialization in that it's basically just an arm of New York and um you know when talking to a professional a partner at a big law firm in Cayman they said you know I don't want if I'm a person in New York and I came in uh lawyer working on me if I expect them to answer the call when I'm going to meet them you know 24 hours a day and so you know Cayman reacts very quickly because they're on the same time zone they're same location um you know two two hours by flight but the reactive and so the the reactive as as as excellent administrators um I'm not sure how yeah if you could maybe be more specific with your question um I don't know if it'll improve the image of tax havens I'm not sure that that really means um Julie would have you experienced any reactions that the Caymans have made to the EU tax haven blacklist so I've spoken to Jude Scott who's the head of Cayman Finance in the Cayman Islands and he's sort of the voice of most of the financial industry separate from government they're you know the government's opinion is distinct from Cayman Finance sometimes they they they work together on the same things um and and they do have lots of written work and they've employed a Oxford economics a company not Oxford economics but a company called Oxford Economics based in New York uh to do a lot of research for them uh and uh I think they're they're sort of doing that now you know getting the research and I commend them for at least getting research done I've actually spoken to him and told him to read a lot of stuff published by the same people that I read uh and to be ready for for you know difficult questions um but I think there's the people have to realize that they are a very small island with a very very small group of people working on you know problems that are that are you know really out of their scope and out of their reach in terms of answering these OECD and EU policies and they are working hard and there are there are always going to be attacked and that that means that they have to figure out where they want to focus all the resources watching that happen from the ground here uh is uh pretty pretty impressive um but they're they're yeah obviously they're they're they're always going to be fighting this uphill battle and trying to figure out where they're going to be next in the next five or ten years uh is going to be interesting because I've been watching closely to figure out what this future of offshore is going to be like and hopefully for my next project is to figure out what the next offshore financial center will look like in a digital economy uh when there's going to be a place like the Cayman Islands that ceases to exist in a physical form so what would a digital offshore look like and I think Cayman is trying to figure that out as well and I'm trying to get ahead of that to figure out what that might be for you know other nations um Peter Ringstead uh thank you for your touching introduction how does the local population feel about the large expat community and offshore financial community it creates a lot of local jobs but also increased cost of living could you talk about this and is there open local debate yeah so uh there's a really funny story that I'll tell you guys about uh after I say that the expat community has a lot of good work done here they've introduced a lot of you know really good um you know social programs and and all these other things just as a result of the the money that they're able to bring here um and so Roy Bodden uh J. A. Roy Bodden who used to be a politician here and then a president of the local community college who's also got a chapter in the book that I was in talks about these this expatriate tension between and local and expatriate tension um Amit Vareed Talai who's an anthropologist in Canada also writes about these tensions as well back in you know 1995 and what you'll notice who came in compared to BVI and Bermuda is that these tensions are very slightly are very different actually from each other uh the the BVI have this belongers status written into their law in that when you walk into the BVI airport when you used to walk into the BVI airport there was a line up the passport control and it would say belongers or non-belongers uh and Bill Maurer an anthropologist uh wrote a book on that land, law and citizenship in the BVI about basically how how the government and how the locals as a result of the laws enacted against the locals you know placed people and so Bermuda for example uh you're not allowed to own a home or a car uh in in Bermuda and as as an expat and as a result expats are all on mopeds or they live in houses behind houses uh and so the treatment of expats is phenomenally uh different in Cayman they're very expat friendly they've always been open to um to visitors here compared to other islands in terms of work and that really sets the tone of any expat who wants to come here either temporarily or for five years or for 10 years uh and that that's how the the island developed culture so they appreciate them and of course there are lots of um you know animosomies amongst different things about um you know Caymanians not getting jobs for um you know that they they think that they're qualified for and losing them to expats that that dialogue will always be there the funny story is that you know how do they feel now because we've been on lockdown for about two months and that we've had a curfew which means we have to be in our homes by 7pm and it's been going on for about two months now as of today we're half of us are allowed home in the beach for two hours um but the the funny thing is uh uh Cayman was lacking kits and so we did not have any testing capacity and our medical supplies to do testing for COVID-19 were blocked uh by the US and like every small island we were struggling with getting um access to kits so the local billionaire here Ken Dart who is the um heir to the Styrofoam the Dixie Cup Styrofoam fortune worked with the local um businessmen and a couple politicians to acquire kits uh think about 200 or 300,000 kits for an island of 60,000 people in South Korea and to get that kit from South Korea to Cayman he uh loaned his private jet which flew the kit to Alaska and then down to Cayman so if you google the Cayman compass news and Dart uh you'll read about that story and so it's about the the harmonious you know relationship between the locals and the expats where you know in times like this when you know you're able to get the power of this this person to to bring these much needed medical supplies here to do the testing uh it's it's happening right now and it's tenuous but right now they really do appreciate the business community uh for one example of that um question for from guy may can you say some more about what you unearthed from interviewing and talking to Caymanian citizens um I think there's a different uh different uh groups of Caymanian citizens that I've been able to talk to um I've got a lot of friends here now who are not in the financial industry at all they're musicians artists um and in the tourism industry uh and generally they see that the spending here has has helped with their local economy and that you know Cayman is pretty well developed it's got pretty nice roads compared to other islands and all this is a result of the money that's being brought in by the clients of the financial industry and the tourism as a result you come here for your annual board meeting for your hedge fund you stay for a week you get the rits with your family you know you spend probably twenty thirty thousand dollars in that week so they produce tourism for the economy at a very high level that other islands um don't don't get as much too um um uh so I think in the last uh sorry the the guy question just disappeared yeah so there's a mixed bag because there are a lot of very smart Caymanians here too and a lot of them do end up in the financial industry uh one of the common things that that really happens here is that Caymanians go abroad they go to the US, Canada, the UK to do their schooling and education then they come back and if they can a lot of them do uh end up working for these natural industries um and there are lots of programs there for them to to get in there and so when you talk to the partners in these these natural industries they'll say that they're desperate for Caymanians uh or competent and qualified Caymanians and that it's it's really hard to get the good ones because they get snapped up easily and so there's a very highly educated Caymanian population which are doing very well uh but then there's also a not as educated or a trades educated Caymanian who's who's doing moderately well and then there's there's you know probably quite a few who are less educated who are likely struggling um and and so they're these different gradations of acceptance of the financial industry based on the type of industry employment you're in and to the type of immediate benefit that you get from this industry um I'm going to answer your question from uh Rod Rigo uh did you see the investigative journalistic sources for doing your series did did I use investigative journalistic sources for doing my research uh what's what's your or your participants in the media coverage on tax havens um I'm thinking of panel papers or paradise papers um they don't let they don't like journalistic media I think there was a BBC documentary on the Cayman Islands that was done a few years ago a guy came down here interviewed some guy in a Ferrari uh and I talked to a group of I joined the women in insolvency and restructuring here and that's how I met a group of you know 50 women here who who basically clean up the messes of all the crises they're all bankrupt seen insolvency experts who they were talking about this this coverage on the BBC and how poor reporting it was and I think that the the problem with with the the the media pieces is that they come down here and they spend a few weeks here at most and they and they leave with the story but they don't they don't actually get as much time to talk to the people and observe these things and so I guess the advantage for my PhD was that I've I've cumulatively spent you know three or four years down here I spent a lot of time talking to people and I've attended a lot of local conferences and I've really gotten a sense of of what's happened here and as a result I've built I've been able to gain a lot of trust and I've not had to use you know tactics that maybe media have tried to to use maybe undercover exposés I've not done any of that I've done it in a very pretty clear and transparent way and I think as a result it means I won't be kicked out of the island for example and you know they'll continue to talk to me I've created forums for the the Cayman folks to come to Cambridge to talk about the work and I will continue to create these forums so that they can speak on their behalf from you know by themselves to to to to the world on on actually what they do and I think that's a much better approach because you know if you if you have these islands shut down and not talk to the outsiders completely and that's been the problem with a lot of these islands you know it's it's never going to work to to resolve any of these tensions that are between offshore and offshore and I think an open dialogue if I can create it and using academic you know forums I think is going to be helpful in the long run in that we're going to be able to access more information ask them for more information and get it and to you know have an easy line to actually talk to people to get it so rather than dain through old you know Bank of International Settlement statements which I think Sufen does which is which is you know a good good methodology I'm hoping that one day we'll be able to you know get access to pieces of information that that you know you wouldn't normally be able to get access to by you know reaching out to a group or an individual in Cayman to to talk about a question from Rohan thanks me that was an informative presentation you welcome how do you manage to gauge how offshore professionals in the Cayman view the legitimacy of the transnational normative framework and how have their legal financial practices navigated Cayman's stigmatization as a tax hidden so one of the interesting things that I've noticed over the I think at eight about 50 or 50 formal interviews was that the first thing that they would tell me is that we're not a tax haven and and and sometimes throughout the at the end of the conversation they would let out and say you know the taxes have been they would say something to that to that degree but it was always you're not a tax haven and it's because they've gone through decades and decades of the defensive of going off OECD blacklist what about Switzerland what about the US and all these other things that they've not had time to develop these other conversations that they so desperately need to have with the world in that they're stuck on these different tiers and that's interesting because that's what Jude Scott at Cayman finance has been trying to do he gives these marketing talks around the world about you know what Cayman does and it's this very basic infographic of five or six things and and you know there's a basic level of conversation that you can have to say we are not tax haven we're not tax haven and then there's like the second and the third and the fourth level of conversation where you can actually talk about very you know detailed aspects of your law that are inflammatory or you know not not beneficial to certain countries and I think those conversations are really difficult to get through because Cayman feels as if it needs to cut through the through through all these layers of conversation and has to figure out how you position yourself and how you're going to frame them after your conversation with them and that's why it's so difficult to get access to locals and local practitioners who are actually you know operating here so yeah at the moment they're still on the defensive Victoria have you gained any impression of the extent to which the financial sector lobbies and influences the government on the Cayman Islands and how their political influences perceived uh I think locally people realize that because you're such a small village you are going to go to school and your kids are going to go to school with the ministers and finance people and other law firms and competing law firms and so you have to understand the culture of this place is that it's a small village but they are trying as best as they can coming from South Africa, the US, Australia, Canada, New Zealand to practice in a in a in a formal manner and confidentiality and all of these other things and it's hard to separate the influences because the government relies quite heavily on the private sector to develop its laws to give feedback on a lot of its policies because the government really you know is interested in the financial services sector in so far as how it can bring money to its economy and to support its locals and development of its locals and so you know they are pretty intertwined they try to be separate but if you look at other small economies around the world small island states particularly there's a group of people who study the culture of small island states the ISA I think they're called the Institute of Small Island States it is a very different way of doing things and the reason why we've become so fascinated with Cayman compared to other small island states is because it just happens to be you know the top five one of the top five financial centers in the world so it's a weird small you know small small small world big money type of thing and economic geographers like Susan Roberts for example and Thomas Rain right right pretty brilliantly on on that culture on how to figure an offshore financial center out based on that lotta says following following these expats did you try to go beyond understanding them in their professional roles or following Dominic Boyer's manifesto of aiming to understand them as entire human beings I would really be interested to know about your field work considerations yeah so when I began I started studying elite research for elite theories and I realized that studying elites wasn't actually really my interest I wasn't interested in studying the billionaires or the multimillionaries who used the Cayman Islands it's actually interested in the local practitioners and the professionals and so I started looking at professionals research and that's where I found more easily used work by two two people I go guided by but it's some transnational legal orders by Terry Halliday and Greg Schaefer so that's been a really good help for understanding like the structure and then a really good case study has been done by Terry Halliday and Bruce Tyler's on bankrupt and basically the global financial the sort of the Asian financial crisis basically made them realize that you know we need global bankruptcy norms and they follow you know South Korea China and a couple of other countries and how they implemented these like legal norms bankruptcy codes and how they were actually practiced by locals or or or rejected by locals and all the local things that happened that fed into the national and then to the global norms so I looked at these types of legal feedback loops through those two authors the other thing I did was I combined a lot of anthropological work using ethnography and that was based on Bill Maurer and George Marcus who are based at UC Irvine and I was actually there for about eight months before I started my PhD so they've influenced me heavily on what I do George Marcus has something called para ethnography and para ethnography basically means studying people who are just as you know if not more clever than you who work in fields that are similar to yours so in traditional ethnography you look at man's law and he goes and he studies tribes and villages or he studies you know cultures but when you start studying people who are lawyers and who are funded administrators people who do you know complex calculations on a daily basis they're not going to to to accept some of the types of questions that you'd be able to answer sorry to be able to ask people in other ethnographic environments and so para ethnography offers a solution to that and if you google that you'll be able to to see the types of things that happens with that but but one of the things the features of para ethnography is that you engage with them and figure out things with them and they help you figure out things by these more long detailed and deep academic key conversations para sighting or multi-sighted ethnography is basically another thing that I did was basically following these people around the world but specifically I invited them to Cambridge I took them out of their came in comfort zone a lot of them work in London and so bringing them to Cambridge and having them talk about the Cayman Islands in that other site was I think one of the more successful things I was able to accomplish and to have them talk about it on my behalf helped me a significantly and then I could study how they perceive the audience reactions to that as well and then a question from Dominic what is the attitude it came into the previous council is the UK legal involvement a help or hindrance to the work of professionals and then how does this work for US clients this is a really interesting question because Cayman really I think that there's there's a respect for the privy council and there's a respect for the courts here and one of the things that the lawyers and even London lawyers who get seconded to Cayman for work say is that there's just not enough people here there are not much judges so the cases get backlogged the financial services division in courts here are you know extremely adept and they're they get a lot of work doing complex cases and you'll if you read certain cases about cases that go to the privy council I think some of the comments from the lawyers here have basically said that you know these offshore judicial systems are actually financial for the financial services industry are really advanced and technical and when they head to the privy councils sometimes they feel like their wings are clipped in that they've got to go back to more traditional thought thoughts and structures and so I think there's a bit of attention there and that offshore is moving rapidly and cases in offshore and the financial services division are moving rapidly but if you have to go to the privy council sometimes you'll find that the layer of thoughts you know are not as open or tuned to some of the thoughts that are developing offshore so sometimes there's this feeling that the privy council is you know this clipping of the wings and you'll see see that term used in some of the academic articles about that and then the second question was the U.S. well the U.S. love using Cayman because it's a you know different legal structure which they have access to and one of the things I was going to add was that the reason why bankruptcy insolvency is popular here is because you can claim something called a chapter 15 bankruptcy in Cayman or yeah chapter 15 I think but basically if you claim bankruptcy in Cayman you can claim an American style bankruptcy and once you claim that you have access to all of the Cayman sorry all the American laws and all the American legislation in your hands and that means the U.S. will respect any sort of chapter 15 American style bankruptcy that you declare Cayman and then basically support any request for documents or information so you have the power of American law at your hands and regulators at your hand in order to enforce any orders that you have in Cayman based on that and so that's why you've got this mix of British and American law with the force of American regulation and power to get whatever you need. Well thank you very much you said when we started that you wanted to inside a lot of discussion and you've certainly done that it worked extremely hard in answering all of those questions the topic was obviously of a huge level of interest to people from lots of different disciplines so it's been a great pleasure to boost you even if it's virtually and thank you so much for all the effort you put into the talk and to answering all the questions it's been really fascinating for me so thank you very much to May and thank you to everyone for coming and hopefully the social legal group will have more events either like this or physically in the not too distant future so thank you very much. Thank you Brian and thank you everyone and we're in our tax group in Cambridge we're trying to get a virtual one starter as well so if you're interested in more tax related things it'll get posted in the next one or two weeks our website is tax tax tax dot tax and it'll it'll be live in a few weeks with some more hopefully semi weekly discussions. Great okay so very easy to remember web address at least so okay thanks very much see you next time