In today’s iNews Cayman we have published an article courtesy of Business Insider under the title “London’s most exclusive clubs”. However, my Editorial has nothing to do with that story.

The Exclusive Club I am talking about is here in the Cayman Islands operating, I believe, illegally and the government agencies who are supposed to oversee and stop it are doing nothing.

Whilst we operate here under Trade and Business licences we promote competition. But it has to be fair.

The Exclusive Club is far from fair. The club has only one member at a time.

When Joan and I started television here there were two other licences given out, although the government gave one of the three (not us) a twelve month head start. That was revoked after six months and we were given ours along with the other company, whom we aligned ourselves with. We did try to do the same with the other one but we were told bluntly he had a head start and we would be dust very soon!

He tried to become a member of the Exclusive Club. He had been able to secure contracts with companies who supplied TV programming with exclusive agreements. Two of these were CNN and ESPN.

However, the government in the television licensing agreement made it clear that any exclusive rights agreement had to be shared. In other words he had to sell us part of those rights if we wanted them. And the price had to be reasonable. There could be no Exclusive Club.

Therefore I am surprised at what I see happening here today under OfReg.

The World Cup was shown exclusive by Logic and they were allowed to be the only member of the Exclusive Club.

The Olympic Games was secured by Hurley’s Entertainment and they were the only member of that Exclusive Club.

If OfReg are allowing this to happen we could in the foreseeable future have only one television provider. The one with the most clout and money could obtain exclusive agreements with all the major TF programmers and force his competitors out of business. Then, with no competition, watch how high your cable bill rates go up.

OfReg are currently investigating anti-competition allegations in the Cayman Islands propane market but allowing television companies to do what they like.

Logic and C3 are the only providers showing Cayman’s only free over the air broadcast station, Cayman27, even though the other cable provider is supposed to show one channel of local programming with the emphasis on local news.

In my days of owning the TV license all of us had to provide one local station showing local news, the cost of which was paid for by advertising and the revenues from the cable operation.

When the government put out a survey to ask the general public what they thought, they actually supplied their own answers to the question fashioned in a way to sway the answer in favour of not mandating a local station. The reason for this is because of their own Government TV station that is NOT free over the air.

Government want to be a member of their own Exclusive Club.