The main story on the front page of the 1 April 1976 issue of the Caymanian Compass was about four Jamaican nationals being charged with assault and detaining.
The Magistrate’s Court heard New Zealand business executive Gerald Brian Chambers testify for two hours about how he and his secretary, Angela Palomino, were assaulted, abused, threatened and unlawfully detained in Cayman between late Sunday and the early hours of Monday by four Jamaicans who claimed to be ‘Michael Manley’s Men’, and allegedly employed by Superintendent Thompson of Kingston.
The incident caused “quite a stir” throughout the islands. Chambers understood that Thompson was second in command of the Financial Intelligence Unit, attached to the Bank of Jamaica, and set up a few months ago by the government to investigate breaches of exchange control.
Chambers said the men told him they had been trailing him for days in the US and had tapes of telephone conversations of him with a senior partner of a law firm in Canada, and wanted to know where that senior partner was, plus accused them both of stealing money. One man said it was $300,00 and while another said it was $2 million.
The main photo on the front page was of Harvey ‘The General’ Parsons with an 80-pound wahoo he had caught.
Another article was that the Cayman Turtle Farm Ltd., the German/British-owned company that purchased the turtle farm, was planning to pay off the unsecured creditors out of the profits. The company said it did not want the unsecured creditors who had supported turtle farming in the past to suffer.
Another article appeared on page 3 sharing that Cayman received a conditional invitation to compete in the Montreal Olympics. This would be the first time the Cayman Islands Olympic Committee had put forward Olympic representatives from Cayman.
The editorial tackled two topics: Financial privacy and the Turtle Farm holding.
Regarding financial privacy, the editorial said that Cayman appeared to be “becoming a target of people or agencies from other countries seeking to probe into the financial affairs of their citizens”. It also noted that it is up to government and the law to keep Cayman’s regulations “iron-clad and inviolate, and to mete out due punishment to person or persons found guilty”.
On the Turtle Farm, the editorial said that it is a good thing for the country that the government is now a partner in the organisation. Government will be aware of all that is happening in connection with the turtle industry, which provides employment for Caymanians and is a tourist attraction, it noted.
A notice from Cayman Islands Telephone appeared on page 7 to remind people to pay their bills and showed the prefix numbers for the various districts.
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