Confidence Men: Offshore Finance and Citizenship

Abstract

On Saturday 2 August 1997 the Irish Times carried a story with the headline ‘Cayman Mourns Loss of a Model Citizen’. Two days later the Irish Times ran another story: ‘Masonic Theme at Furze Funeral’. Both stories were accounts of the funeral preparations and ceremony for an expatriate Englishman named John Furze who had died in a Miami hospital four days after a heart operation (Keena, 1997a, 1997b). The funeral was held in George Town, capital of the Cayman Islands — a collection of three small Caribbean islands, which are a British dependency. The funeral was a big one: there were 24 honorary pall-bearers, eulogies from Caymanian politicians and business leaders, and a police escort for the cortege. John Furze was 55 years old when he died, a recently retired banker who had lived the last 30 years of his life in the Cayman Islands. He had visited Ireland only occasionally. Why did the Irish Times run two stories, both in the ‘Home’ (rather than ‘Foreign’) section, on this funeral held on a small island so far away?