Pinewood...more Govt Propaganda

[Mac the Knife]

An excellent exposition by Newsnight. He/she isto be congratulated on the research and to my mind plain explanation of the total conflict of interest of Steven Christian and the obfuscation of Mr Teare.

 

In addition the manner in which both Mr Teare and Mr Bell reply to genuine and valid questions from both MHK's and people like Newsnight is demeaning and in many cases downright rude.

 

Whether this bluster is merely trying to hide the true facts is also open to question.

 

All one can do is plug away at the facts as Newsnight is currently doing.

 

It would be interesting to see whether his post if framed as a letter to IOM Newspapers would be published,they currently seem to publish some rather lengthy boring stuff and this is far more germane.

 

As raised elsewhere if they had any investigative skills, they would be following this up themselves.

 

Keep up the good work Newsnight

[interestedman]

Quick..... get a good hold of that crab before he gets out of the basket.................................

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Oh too late, life can be a bitch sometimes and instead of moaning about someone doing well for themselves why not concentrate on your own life and its direction?

Because, Boris, it's our money that's being spent. I know that Messrs Bell, Teare et al seem to think it is their money and that the plebs need not concern themselves, but clearly some people are getting very wealthy out of these deals and I think it's only fair that us plebs know a bit more about the whys and wherefore's don't you think ??

[quilp]

Will Roger or Stuey touch on this in the next 2 hours?

[Albert Tatlock]

Will Roger or Stuey touch on this in the next 2 hours?

I somehow doubt it. It's too sensitive for Roger and too complex for our Stuey.

[Shake me up Judy]

I wonder if someone could put Newsnight's excellent work into layman terms for those of us who don't know one side of a balance sheet from the other. I know this whole thing stinks of fish but I struggle to make sense of all the digging that Newsnight has done.

[Albert Tatlock]

I wonder if someone could put Newsnight's excellent work into layman terms for those of us who don't know one side of a balance sheet from the other.

I shall make an attempt....

 

[paswt]

 

Quick..... get a good hold of that crab before he gets out of the basket.................................

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Oh too late, life can be a bitch sometimes and instead of moaning about someone doing well for themselves why not concentrate on your own life and its direction?

Because, Boris, it's our money that's being spent. I know that Messrs Bell, Teare et al seem to think it is their money and that the plebs need not concern themselves, but clearly some people are getting very wealthy out of these deals and I think it's only fair that us plebs know a bit more about the whys and wherefore's don't you think ??

Good post boris sees no problem, perhaps because he's part of the problem ?

 

He may be doing well for himself, maybe hitching a ride on the 'gravy train'?

 

His main interest , it would appear, is directing others how to run their lives (see Subaru thread) .

 

So a bit rich for him to tell others to

 

"Stop moaning about someone doing well for themselves why not concentrate on your own life and direction"

Edited June 8, 2014 by paswt

[quilp]

I wonder if someone could put Newsnight's excellent work into layman terms for those of us who don't know one side of a balance sheet from the other. I know this whole thing stinks of fish but I struggle to make sense of all the digging that Newsnight has done.

 

 

You could start with the notion of vested-interest and, ''The Isle of Man Where You Can''.

[newsnight]

4. KEY ISSUES OF CONCERN (1): GOVERNANCE ISSUES

TRANSPARENCY AND ACCOUNTABILITY

“4.2 When, in 2007, the arrangements with CinemaNX were being set up, no consideration appears to have been given to whether Tynwald should have a say in such a novel departure.

The idea was put to Treasury by Steven Christian in January 2007 and set out in more detail in a formal Treasury paper written in February 2007.

The new arrangements were alluded to by the Treasury Minister in his budget speech in March 2007 but the comments in the Pink Book were vague and there was no explicit motion on the Tynwald Order Paper.

It might be argued that this was no different from a decision to place funds with any other external fund manager, something which the Treasury is expected to do as a matter of routine without always seeking Tynwald approval.

However, given the high profile of the film industry and the degree of new risk involved, we believe that specific approval should have been sought from Tynwald“.

4.5 We note that in 2007 the company received the entire balance of the Media Development Fund, some £50 million which is available for investment subject to Treasury approval on a project by project basis. This is a significant sum of public money and we have therefore decided to make the audited 2008 accounts public by placing them in the Tynwald Library.

4.6 With reference to one of the issues identified at the beginning of our investigation, regarding the complexity of the landscape within film finance, we have concluded that the landscape is genuinely complex and there are real commercial sensitivities about releasing too much information. However, it is also the case that the Treasury and CinemaNX are handling large sums of money on behalf of Tynwald and the public.

We believe that more could be done by the Treasury to explain what is being done with that money, how it is being done, and why.

15.

Let’s agree the Film Fund is a complicated matter? There is a lot of reading material and it takes time to consider and understand the information about it all, that much is obvious isn’t it? So why bother?

Government is like that, layer after layer of paper until it stacks up and blots out the bigger view, until all that can be seen is a morass of words and who wants to try and get though that?

Well I suggest you do, in fact I would go so far as to say the reason why the IOM is in the mess that it is largely, because of me and you.

We let them do this to us, in fact we didn’t just let them we actively ignored them when they were doing it to us. They knew it and they depended on that fact to get away with it.

Not long from now there will be a General Election and out of the present incumbents in the House of Keys some will take the opportunity to ‘retire’ and if they haven’t before, some will expect their former chums in the Parliament to vote them onto the Legislative Council.

From the safety of the Legislative Council they won’t ever have to face anyone of us at the ballot box again, so why should they give a moments consideration about what I or you think about them? We don’t matter, we don’t count, and especially not when the votes to get them onto the Legislative Council are counted up.

The rest will come a knocking on our doors and they will do it on the sure belief that, you will have not concerned yourself overmuch with the details of what the Government has been doing with our money over the previous five years, that we can be kidded or distracted as easily as shinning a light on a wall and watching a cat jumping up and down trying to catch it, it never will.

They think we are as dumb as a box of cut grass.

Well, what I have been banging on about over the years is this. We have a Government that plays with the law like it is a shuttlecock to be knocked about as it pleases. The proof of that is there to be read if you want to read it. That is seriously bad for everyone of us.

Why bother with all the reading and the postings? Because there are those private individuals who in business really do understand how the system of Government works, they know it better than the civil servants and the know it a damn sight better than the politician’s who are supposed to be in charge of running the country. When push comes to shove we pay for that, all of it.

Why does that matter? It matters because they take full advantage of that understanding and over the years we have seen private companies write tax law with the clear objective to benefit who?

We have seen a private individual take over a prominent Manx company and in the words of the Committee, “We conclude that the Sefton Group had been very badly managed under the leadership of Mr Ferguson Lacey. However, he does not bear the whole responsibility – the other directors who were in office at the time should have restrained him from making some of the purchases which were without sound financial basis.

Well that’s a masterpiece of understatement isn’t it?

http://www.tynwald.org.im/business/pp/Reports/2013-PP-0156.pdf

The result of that fiasco is we stood as silent witnesses as some of our senior politician’s and their dependable yapping MHK’s threw hissy-fits when it was pointed out to them by other elected representative in the Parliament the absurdity of the present Sefton director’s proclaiming how good the public money bail out has been for the shareholders of the Group, when the majority shareholders are in fact multi-millionaire best pals of Graham Ferguson Lacey in the first and last place. Why did they have hissy-fits? Because they know it but they don’t want me or you to know it.

Now we see that although the Sefton didn’t pay its tax or NI it didn’t get prosecuted, but other companies on the IOM do, so why not lend or give those companies public money and save a prosecution too? Because?

The evidence is there to see, the examples are many and jaw-dropping in the amounts of public money involved.

Think about it? A person, a company with no history or experience in either building or running a film studio is grant aided to the tune of over £700K and the alternative applicant with an existing studio is turned down. Why was that? The Government thinks, Who cares what we do? The public will never get to know about it, and even if it does, so what?

A private individual writes Government policy and as a direct result of that makes how many millions for himself? What happens when elected MHK’s ask why that should be the case and how did that come about?

A private company writes tax law and makes how many millions for itself?

The Government falls in line and it is done. Remind yourself for a moment, where does that money come from?

Take a closer look? “4.2 When, in 2007, the arrangements with CinemaNX were being set up, no consideration appears to have been given to whether Tynwald should have a say in such a novel departure“. No consideration appears to have been given to whether Tynwald should have a say in such a novel departure.

What is the Tynwald for? Why are we letting the Speaker and the President sit on either side in the pockets of the Chief Minister?

Is that because in reality COMIN really doesn’t care about the Tynwald and is that largely because the people who have been elected to defend it against the Executive usually don’t?

I suspect that some of the readers of these postings are civil servants and they know what goes on behind the scenes, how the rules are bent and broken on a daily basis, how Minister’s are either manipulated or ignored as a matter of habit. They know it and now we know it too.

These events have cost us a lot more than money, these events and the causes of them are going to be very costly to the future of every single one of us, and I strongly suggest that each one of us might like to think about how much this is going to cost us personally for letting them do it to us all?

Unless this ongoing assault on our Parliamentary Democracy finally dealt with and stopped I think we are going to experience more hardships, more cuts, more of the Film Fund, the Sefton, the Hospital, fill in your own example next?

Is it down to us to say to our MHK’s we are not having it, and we are obliged to make it plain that they can’t do it anymore, because they won‘t be in the House of Keys to do it after the next General Election and that is because we won‘t be voting for them?

Manx Radio and the local press won’t do much if anything to provide us with the information we must have to be informed about what our Government is doing with our money, and why they are spending it and what they are spending on, we are going to have to do the work for ourselves.

So why bother? Because if we don’t the only people to finally take the blame for the mess we are in now or the failure to clean it up will be me and you.

For the expressed appreciation of the small contribution I have made to get the facts out for us all to consider, my sincere thanks.

[quilp]

Awesome.

[WTF]

the sad thing is the usual suspects we have who stand again will get voted back in after spouting the bullshit promise of change. the electorate will fall for it again!!! it would be nice for a clean sweep of new folks who will release the facts we seem to be denied by the current incumbents.

[Lisenchuk]

 

I wonder if someone could put Newsnight's excellent work into layman terms for those of us who don't know one side of a balance sheet from the other. I know this whole thing stinks of fish but I struggle to make sense of all the digging that Newsnight has done.

 

 

You could start with the notion of vested-interest and, ''The Isle of Man Where You Can''.

And finish with several prison sentences for unlawful conduct.

[ubbiali]

Excellent posts Newsnight, thanks.

 

The problems will continue while there is a total lack of accountability and while MHKs (with a couple of notable exceptions) and MLCs bask in an environment where they clearly consider themselves inviolate. The present abused Comin system without a freedom of information act cannot serve the Isle of Man well but a few select individuals seem to do very well indeed.

[The Sick Moon]

And finish with several prison sentences for unlawful conduct.

 

Which is the unlawful bit?

[Lisenchuk]

 

And finish with several prison sentences for unlawful conduct.

 

Which is the unlawful bit?

The conduct,but I also wish your trolling was.