The FIFA scandal

(I've posted this on the Cayman Islands country-forum, but there are bound to be many EB members with an interest in the scandal who wouldn't think to check that section. So with the consent of the administrators I will post it again here. All followers of football ("soccer" to North Americans and Australians) will surely be interested to follow developments, and this could be a very long-lasting thread!)

As you'd expect, there's a huge hoo-hah here, which finds expats and native-born Caymanians on opposite sides of the fence. Not only was a local man - a born-and-bred "bloodline" Caymanian, at that - one of the seven officials arrested and now languishing in a Swiss jail, but one of our half-dozen commercial banks is strongly suspected of processing some of the FIFA bribes money. Also, the head of our Monetary Authority is married to one of the attendees at the fiasco in Switzerland.

The Editor of our daily newspaper (he an immigrant expat of long standing) took the opportunity to lambast Cayman and Caymanians in general for tolerating a culture of corruption. Our Premier (another bloodline Caymanian, and leader of the generally acknowledged anti-expat political party) went hysterical. Rejecting the accusation as an insult to ALL Caymanians and residents, he labelled the paper's Editorial "treasonous", and persuaded the local legislators to resolve to pull all government advertising from the paper forever more. Cripes!

The radio talk-programs ran hot, with so much hostility that the Editor and his wife feared for their personal safety and fled to Florida in a chartered plane. Where they remain to this day.

We are all agog, here, and don't know what will happen next. The Editor was unwise to flee, the Premier was a fool to lose his sense of perspective, and his cronies were silly to go nuclear on the newspaper. It's a majorly divisive issue, you can be sure.