THE Winter Olympics have been occupying a good deal of my television viewing time in the past week or so.

I’m not sure which has been more captivating – the death-defying slides, glides and leaps leading to medal victory, or the equally death-defying and in some cases lethal crashes and falls that have left numerous bodies littering the slopes of Whistler Mountain.

Certainly no reality TV series could be more absorbing than the real-time Super G, skeleton bob and, of course, the ill-fated luge, during which one competitor died even before the competition had begun.

Why the human race enjoys flinging itself at high speed down these phenomenally steep and slippery slopes is difficult to fathom, particularly when it involves lying prone on a piece of metal, either face down or face up, but at any rate the latter activity has earned Britain its only Winter Olympic gold medal for many a year.

Entertaining to watch it certainly is, but I can’t say that if someone were to offer me a holiday during Winter Olympic season I would turn it down just to sit and watch other people enjoying themselves in the snow.

Yet according to Jersey’s director of tourism, that is exactly what hordes of potential visitors to Jersey are going to be doing this summer – forgoing their holiday break in order to watch television.

True, this will not be any old television. This will be the football World Cup.
And David de Carteret seems convinced that unless Jersey does something phenomenal – maybe erecting giant screens beside every swimming pool – very few people will be willing to move from their armchairs and remote controls at home, with a resulting drop in Jersey’s summer visitor numbers.

I confess I am not the greatest of footie fans. I’m the one whose eyes glaze over and whose face immobilises at the first mention of ‘the beautiful game’. So marked is my obvious disinterest in this global compulsion that my anti-football face has afforded friends and acquaintances many moments of hilarity. It’s not really my fault – I just grew up in a family where the sight of 22 men kicking a bag of wind around a field wasn’t considered of interest.

If Jersey’s tourism director is right, though, this year’s World Cup may be the last straw for an industry that has already suffered enough from the recession. So drastic measures are called for. I’d like to suggest, at the risk of being lynched and then ostracised, that the Island should be marketed as a World
Cup-free zone.

At the very least, it would grab public attention like nothing else.

Well done, community bank
I WAS delighted to see that Jersey’s ‘community bank’, Community Savings and Credit Ltd, has come to the rescue of the thrift clubs.

I came across Community Savings a few years ago, as a business reporter, and have followed their fortunes ever since.

The company – which is now situated behind the Town Hall – is run by a retired banker and an experienced team made up of part-time staff and volunteers. It exists to help those who, for whatever reason, are not able to use mainstream banking facilities but who would like to put aside small sums of money and get some impartial and confidential advice about financial matters.

By becoming part of an existing organisation which is run for the good of members, the thrift clubs will be gaining from the experience of the staff, as well as swelling the number of members, which in turn will enable the ‘credit’ side of the company to provide some help when it is appropriate.

So bravo to Community Savings – and a big boo hoo to Royal Bank of Scotland International who, for whatever reason, are too busy to deal with the thrift clubs’ accounts.

Presumably RBS has more important things to do, in the light of this week’s reports of £3.6 billion losses – not to mention bonuses totalling £1.3 billion.

UK gets message across on tax exiles
IT will not have escaped the notice of those interested in such things that the UK has come down hard on the main sponsor of one of Jersey’s most popular annual events.

Robert Gaines-Cooper, sponsor of the International Air Display, was last week given the unwelcome news that he could be found to owe the UK tax authorities around £30 million. The Court of Appeal ruling is the latest development in what has become known as the Gaines-Cooper case because of its precedence in the history of UK tax exiles.

The gist of Mr Gaines-Cooper’s story is that for over 20 years he has been a resident of the Seychelles. You might think, therefore, that he would be unlikely to owe the UK tax authorities anything at all. Not a bit of it. The Court of Appeal came to the conclusion that to be exempt from UK taxes, Mr Gaines-Cooper needed to cut all his ties with the UK. This he has failed to do, said the court.

The gravity of the ruling will not have escaped a relative newcomer to Guernsey, either. Guy Hands, whose investment company Terra Firma bought out EMI in 2007, told the Washington Post that he hadn’t visited his wife and children in Kent since April.

However, his wife, Julia, owns Hand-Picked Hotels (of which the L’Horizon in St Brelade is one), so it would not be too much of a hardship to meet up occasionally in Jersey. Nonetheless, it appears that Mr Hands, who moved to the Channel Islands last year in order to pay less tax, is finding the restrictions of exile a little bothersome.

In fact, according to the Washington Post he described it as ‘a burdensome option for me and my family’ in a Manhattan district court hearing.

The upshot is that whereas a few months ago international news bulletins were predicting that the rich and famous would be leaving the UK in droves, they are now said to be ‘shunning tax havens as the crackdown bites’.

Which is exactly the tone that the UK government is hoping to engender with its latest threats.