cheeky boy

Why don't you get yourself jailed & find out

This pretty much sums up the situation If our investment does show a dividend then expect it to be shouted from the rooftops On the other hand if we get nothing other than optomistic press releases, it probably means things aren't going well Roll on the first accounts summary

I know someone who's child was medicated with his stuff and it saved the child from the scrapheap and the mother from the nuthouse The lad was often a bloody nightmare and no amount of parenting / loving /education could change that. He flew into uncontrollable rages and as he became a teenager these got worse He would become very upset after these outbursts realising the damage he was causing but unable to control himself My friend tried everything over the years and was at her wits end, the lad was about to be suspended from school then eventually he was put on medication.He has since stopped the medication, settled down and is doing well at school It's easy to judge if you haven't been close to a situation like this and I'm sure there are cases of lazy parenting, but this solution was hard won from the social services and not just a parental cop out

Couldn't they just hire someone suitable until the new deemster is appointed ?

Quite ironic as he was the sacrificial lamb when the SIB went tits up, Mr Moroney being (I think) younger than Ms Holt at the time He took much of the flack whilst his two co-nominee directors got away relatively unscathed, one of them having a stroke, or as many put it "a stroke of luck"

The opinion I am getting is that if Baines had repaid the monies then the beneficiaries etc of the trust would have let the matter drop. On that basis I am guessing but it may be that TB thought that he would be found not guilty of the first charges having used the money for his defence and having been found not guilty and having some or all his costs met then he would have repaid. The biggest driver in all of this would appear to be that for years TB had been living well beyond his means and that what he was spending was not income bit capital made by his parents. Ultimatly he was not the extremely wealthy individual that he liked to portray or not at the end when much of the savings had been spent but yet he continued to try and live the lifestyle. Consequently he appears to have been somewhat lax and let his judjement drop due to need for funds and accordingly while I do not see him as some hardened criminal it does appear that he probably took various actions which he probably understood were incorrect but gambled that if they came off everything would be all right. They did not and consequently he has deservedly found himself up to his neck in brown stuff. The only author of Baines's downfall is Baines's himself You seem to know more about TB's circumstances than I do LL, I only knew him as a customer and as someone whom I met socially on a number of occasions over the last thirty years, so your analysis may well be correct. However I still hold that he was made an example of to show how squeaky clean our tax regime is and that plenty of other shady business was ignored, I also believe that the Americans were very keen to see this outcome and put in a lot of effort to secure it On a personal basis I always found TB to be a complete gent, polite, generous and fine company. I hope he survives this ordeal intact and goes on to live out his remaining years in peace & quiet

TB was administering the Hermitage trust, I am no expert but I believe that he was in a position to invest funds from that trust in order to make a profit Once again I cannot be absolutely certain, but he appears to have used money from the trust as a loan to himself in order to meet his legal costs He was given to understand that such a transaction was legal when in fact it was not So it's not quite the same as stealing a lump of cash but seeing as certain people on the Island want him hung out to dry, then this is the way the story is being presented to the public

Wow man, where can I get some of that acid ?

He should buy an iPad and give up on dead trees. Maybe a daft question and I am prepared to be ridiculed! Why cant the papers be printed locally? We have the IOM Newspapers so what is stopping them doing it (after contract negotiation). Would seem more 21st Century to me? Shipping/ flying such a bulky/ heavy low cost product every day seems wrong on all sorts of levels to me. Nice idea but where do they get the paper from? It could be printed on the reams of redundant letterheaded paper created when the govt. departments re brand themselves

There's also things like tappet clearance checks , injector changes , crankcase inspections to lump in with the routine maintainance . It could also be for more run of the mill stuff that you can't do with the passengers milling about , ie testing fire hydrants , car deck sprinklers etc . Not all necessarily engine gear , the deckies will have stuff up on the bridge to do as well . Whatever it is there's still no papers in yet

Posted on 3 Nov: I agree, but what's to stop Mezeron doing the same should they take over the SPC ? Maybe a solution would be for the government not to have a UA, but to charge for the use of the linkspans and hand that money back to whichever operator in the form of a passenger subsidy. That would leave the business open to competition but still promote a passenger service. Bearing in mind that we still have a viable tourist industry which needs to be nurtured Do try to keep up

Agreed. It's as if road haulage were expected to fund coach travel. They are funding it at the moment if SPC's comments are true. It is almost a mantra from them that freight subsidises passengers My suggestion was to take that subsidisation out of the hands of the operator and use it as an alternative to the UA as a method of maintaining a passenger service I was also thinking the importance of passengers visiting the Island in terms of tourist revenue

So basically compulsory use and a levy on all freight being introduced to the IoM to subsidise passenger services. I can see that going down well with those who ship freight bbyand craine on and off i.e. Mezzeron. I can see the first that will happen is wwholesallers and retailers will put their prices up and blame the compulsory freight charge you introduced. I can not see that being a popular measure! Scrapping the UA in favour of a freight levy/passenger subsidy would allow competition on a level playing field as long as road freight was obliged to use ro-ro Competition would keep a check on freight fares and the availability of a passenger subsidy would ensure continuation of that service If the SPC were making 30% profit as suggested even whilst repaying a £200 mil loan, it looks like there may well be room for two operators

Stand again next year - please. Flaw in that is that Mezzeron are not using the link span so basically you again have what you have now. The only difference is that rather than the freigt to passenger subsidy being internally done by the ferry operator the government would be doing! Alterative candidate please! I was thinking along the lines of charging per metre of freight for the use of the liknspans, that money would then be allocated on a per passenger basis back to the operator The DHPP or whatever they are now could then insist that only bulk cargo is loaded non ro-ro ensuring that all road freight used the linkspans Thank you for your input PS, the papers have been late every morning this week. Is this the SPC turning the screw?

I agree, but what's to stop Mezeron doing the same should they take over the SPC ? Maybe a solution would be for the government not to have a UA, but to charge for the use of the linkspans and hand that money back to whichever operator in the form of a passenger subsidy. That would leave the business open to competition but still promote a passenger service. Bearing in mind that we still have a viable tourist industry which needs to be nurtured

Seems like the User Agreement has been rendered effectively worthless What looked like a guaranteed monopoly and was valuable enough to borrow £200 mil against is now looking more like a liability

It seems highly unlikely that Tesco etc. will drop their prices in line with any reduction in freight charges, more likely they will sit back and enjoy bigger profit margins Also, if Dhole buy out the SPC they won't be able to operate the whole business on the thin margins they presently enjoy by operating one small cargo ship. So whoever ends up bringing in the baked beans we the consumers will still end up paying a premium

There are two reasons for the SPC's high fares: Firstly they charge whatever they can get away with because they have (until lately) had a monopoly Secondly they have a £200 million loan to service, a loan that was taken out against the projected earnings from the user agreement monopoly My guess is that the massive Dhole Shipping will continue to squeeze the SPC until it's parent company admit that the game is up and sell out to Dhole Remember, it's just business. The SPC are Australian owned and have no allegiance to the Island, if the sums no longer add up they will bale out

Here's one of those seven degrees of separation thingys: SIB Bank loaned money to it's directors and directors mates, one of whom used SIB money to buy the old Regent hotel and spent a fortune (of the same money) doing it up and turning it into the Admiral's Rest where Trevor Baines enjoyed many a good meal. The hotel was later bought by Jaimie Boncompte ran it brilliantly for several years before selling it to Mike Proffit. Who was director of a bank which loaned money.....................

A bit of background might be useful to explain the full folly of the MEA scandal: The Pulrose power station is in fact two plants, the diesel one is the building behind the greenhouse. When construction of the gas turbine plant began the diesel plant was barely ten years old. ( A small fortune was spent taking down the huge chimney then only a fraction into its design life) Not long after the Pulrose diesel plant was finished a brand new power station was built in Peel. One of the proposals was for a gas turbine plant which could run from the Scotland-Ireland gas pipe being laid at the time. This was ruled out as being too expensive and a diesel plant was built, around 1995 I think So by the mid 90s we had three power stations. Enter Mike Profitt, who was running the Admirals Rest hotel at the time. We then get the subsea cable capable of providing most of the Island's electricity and also containing a fibre optic link Somewhere in this Mr Profitt spots two golden opportunities, one is to provide a broadband service via the cable and through the untried technology of sending data down the mains electricity network. The other is to sell electricity back to the UK, which since the privatisation of the power companies needs to buy in top-ups of power due to their networks running close to capacity With the promise of "not letting the lights go out in the Isle of Man" The super gas plant is launched. By the time the cable goes live MT and Cable & Wireless have increased their broadband capacity significantly. When the gas plant goes live it can only supply power to the UK at a profit for an hour or so each day I think the idea was that the massive shady borrowings would be overlooked if the MEA had started earning big revenues for the Island but what actually happened was that taxpayers money was used to back a risky business venture which didn't work I apologise for derailing this topic but the point was to show how shady dealings around government go unpunished whilst the full force of the law is applied when we need to project a squeaky clean image to the world

"Fitted Up" is probably the wrong term for Bainsy's predicament, but if comparisons are made between his case and the MEA debacle then " Sacrificial Lamb" seems an accurate description In the MEA case great pains were taken to ensure that no one was held responsible or prosecuted for fleecing the Manx taxpayer out of 180 million quid. If Bainsy got charged, convicted and jailed for not scrupulously examining the source of the funds then what about our treasury department, what were they doing whilst all the millions were sloshing around under thier noses ? The PKF report into the MEA was due out in May of that year but got buried until the following autumn, presumably because the original draft was to specific in naming those responsible In the Bains case all the stops were pulled out to get a conviction and in the MEA case a similarly large effort was made to whitewash over the entire episode

Don't think I'm old enough yet, but in the autumn of my years I intend to grow a long white beard and spend my days sitting on a bollard by the harbour telling seafaring lies to tourists. I may even get a grant from the DTI Of the old characters my faourite was "Tango" who used to wear a dirty Columbo style mac and trousers which finished several inches above his threadbare socks. He stormed into the old dole office on Westmoreland Road one morning shouting: "You wouldn't get this in Bugaria you know. It's communist, you'd all have to work. Bastards bastards"

As I drift ever quicker down the river of life toward the waterfall of senility my recent memory fades like the ephemeral saisfaction of a MCds happy meal Just tell me what the car was and it will all come back to me

I'm easily mesmerised