The court case currently under way in a plain windowless room in George Town in the Cayman Islands is seen by some Cayman observers as an epilogue - unfinished business from the old days when the small Caribbean territory was a good place for individuals to lodge money they wanted to hide.
These days anyone in authority or interested in promoting the Cayman financial services sector will say that the scene has changed, that the islands are now a sophisticated international financial services centre dependent on institutional or corporate clients who cannot afford to be involved in shady or illegal financial dealings.
The islands, they say, are no longer interested in individual clients whose main concern is that no-one should ever learn about their secret accounts.
The maturation of the hugely successful Cayman financial services venture has coincided with OECD and G7-led initiatives to combat tax havens and money laundering. The jurisdiction believes it can shake off the secretive services it once offered to individual clients, and still prosper. Other less developed offshore jurisdictions are not in such a happy position.
For banks such as Ansbacher Cayman, however, the transition is fraught with difficulties. Ansbacher Cayman, originally Guinness Mahon Cayman Trust, was founded in 1974 and spent the first two decades or longer of its existence assuring clients that confidential business conducted with the bank would always remain just that, confidential.
It was a message which fell on some very receptive Irish ears at a time when not paying due taxes was rife even at what were ostensibly the most respectable levels of Irish society. But society changed and the authorities became more inquisitive and robust, especially in the wake of the 1997 McCracken (Dunnes Payments) tribunal which first discovered the Ansbacher deposits.
The dilemma that created for Ansbacher Cayman is now all too evident and is the direct cause of the line-up in the windowless room in George Town. At a time of globalisation and a worldwide assault on tax havens, the Ansbacher group and its parent, Firstrand, does not want to be seen as in any way disreputable. The group's interest lies in co-operating with the Irish authorities. However, doing that means the Cayman bank must renege on the commitments it gave to former and existing customers.
Some of those customers are the Irish beneficiaries of trusts which were established by their parents perhaps 10 or 20 or more years ago. In some cases the parents are deceased and the discovery by the children that they are the beneficiaries of large, offshore accounts, has all but coincided with the discovery of those accounts by the Irish authorities. The children's inheritances are being eaten up by large tax bills.
While beneficiaries are in negotiations with the Revenue, the High Court inspectors are continuing their inquiries. Any settlements made are presumably on the basis of the full facts as known to the beneficiaries. The case currently before the Cayman courts could see a fresh wave of information flood into the Irish jurisdiction and any party having dealings with the Revenue in a less than frank way could find him or herself in a very awkward position, to say the least.
It seems that some parties who also stand to be affected should the disclosure of information from Ansbacher Cayman go ahead, are not Irish but are persons whose funds were at some stage lodged in Dublin in the Ansbacher deposits. The extent to which the identities of these people may eventually be disclosed in the inspectors' report is unclear. The late Des Traynor, the main architect of the deposits, is said to have urged foreign residents to place money in the Irish banks in the 1980s, because of the severe shortage of liquidity which then existed in the Irish banking system. It is said his motivation was patriotic. Whatever the reason or reasons, they and their Irish counterparts must be ruing the day they listened to him.
