Cayman is often associated with paradise and it is an adjective that is often used to describe it. However, after reading the article in the Cayman Compass (“Ex-chief: Cayman’s London office ‘totally dysfunctional’” at: http://www.compasscayman.com/caycompass/2014/06/23/Ex-chief–Cayman-s-London-office–totally-dysfunctional-/) the Cayman London office is anything but.

Whether it has improved now I can only conjecture but after reading the emails from two employees at that office sent to Lord Blencathra, the former director of the Cayman Islands London office, I would not like to be in the same room as them.

One can be working under a “boss” whom you may dislike but rudeness and refusal to carry out the simplest of orders, ones that had even been sanctioned by chief officer of the Ministry of Home Affairs, Eric Bush, should have resulted in disciplinary action against them from here.

That both these employees still have a job is totally mystifying. It would appear their criteria for still being employed is they are Caymanian. This is emphasized in an email from one of the employees to Blencathra that says, ““I am not sure about any other Caymanian, but I, for one, do not appreciate being naively victimized with the old colonial-style divide and conquer tactic and will not just sit and let it happen anymore.”

The emails obtained by the Compass contain expletives sent to Blencathra and they also disputed he was their boss.

How could this possibly be? We all knew back in Cayman Lord Blencathra was boss – the headman- of the London office. However, the employees there seemed to have been under the delusion that he was just “a consultant with no authority” and even sent out an email to that affect in January 2013 to the chair of the U.K. Overseas Territories Association.

This was obviously not true as when a dispute arose over the location of the maritime office staff that Blencathra had advised, to save money, should be accommodated at the London office, Eric Bush had replied in July he “must side with Lord Blencathra as he is the head of the London office.”

Eric Bush also said in an email, ““I would advise you that any further discourse/communication which is undertaken in the disrespectful tone of some of your recent emails to Lord Blencathra will be considered to be in direct contravention of the code of conduct and values and may result in disciplinary action.”

That this situation could be allowed to continue for so long is beyond me.

It is not as if back here in Cayman they didn’t know about the discord in London, or only Eric Bush was aware of it. Cayman Islands government chief officer Dax Basdeo knew what was going on as the two London employees were sending him emails complaining about Blencathra.

When it was announced in 2011, by then premier McKeeva Bush that Lord Blencathra was head of the London office but wasn’t actually going to work there that spelled a recipe for disaster.

So back in Paradise we were paying Blencathra a hefty fee to run an office in London that the staffers there didn’t know he was the boss and they (the staffers) had even given an instruction to have him cut off and unable to work with the British Foreign office for nearly two months.

In an email to Basdeo and Cabinet Secretary Samuel Rose back in June 2013 Blencathra wrote, “The London office is totally dysfunctional and it will have to be sorted out one way or another before we have a real catastrophe on our hands.”

The head of the U.K. Overseas Territory’s Association wrote an email saying, “Cayman really need to get their act together, it is embarrassing.”

We must all hope Cayman has got its act together and the whole costly association it has had with Lord Blencathra has been embarrassing with negative press reaction, especially in the UK, from the beginning.

Paradise lost.