Judgment in the Court of Appeal

The Commission welcomes this judgment from the Court of Appeal on the Providence matter.  In it, the Court of Appeal highlights and confirms several aspects of the wrongdoing that our Senior Decision Maker originally determined to have taken place. Since that original decision, we have vigorously defended our Senior Decision Maker's findings of wrongdoing against challenges from several parties, with the aim of putting ourselves in a position where we were legally allowed to publish them.   

With this judgment, the Court of Appeal:

(i) Helpfully puts several of the disputed instances of wrongdoing into the public domain for the first time;

(ii) Supports the Commission's process and upholds the reasoning of our Senior Decision Maker in many instances where other parties had fought to overturn or discredit him;

(iii) Asks the Royal Court to think again about some matters in the light of the Court of Appeal’s review of the Royal Court's initial judgment;

(iv) Possibly asks the Commission to do some further work - dependent on the outcome of the further work it has asked the Royal Court to do;

(v) Sets out several insights for company directors as to what good and less good conduct looks like in less than ideal circumstances; and

(vi) Provides a clear explanation as to why the processes that are adopted by the Commission, under the laws passed by the States, to deal with Enforcement matters are compliant with Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights. 

We are as conscious as anyone of the length of time this matter has been going on but continue to view this process as entirely necessary to expose to the public some of the wrongdoing which took place in connection with this fraudulent Ponzi scheme run by Providence in the middle of the last decade.  Whilst we cannot predict the future, we hope that this Court of Appeal judgment will provide a strong legal foundation for the eventual conclusion of this matter. 

Since we started dealing with the failings within the Providence entities more than a decade ago, in conjunction with our colleagues at the Securities and Exchange Commission in the USA, we have made numerous improvements to our supervisory regime although we must stress that all supervisory regimes depend to a great degree on interacting with people who tell the truth. When key people - confining this observation to the former Providence directors currently serving long prison terms in the United States for the purposes of this media release - turn out to be intent on criminal conduct, supervision is always going to struggle. The costs of running a supervisory system which was foolproof in terms of detecting and stopping such people before they committed fraud would be economically crippling for any jurisdiction.  In Guernsey, we are prosperous to a great degree because we have a high trust society with common cultural values and a shared understanding of right and wrong. This makes it possible to do beneficial things which deliver societal goods - things which it would be impractical and uneconomic to do in a low trust society which lacked such a common understanding. At the Commission, whilst seeking to avoid being naively trusting, we will continue to supervise on the basis that the people with whom we interact are generally honest and decent.