Letters to the editor

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Finance in the Caymans

The claim that Britain’s overseas territories are “key nodes in global money-laundering networks” is as unfair to the good people of the Cayman Islands as it is to those of the Falklands (“Laundry list”, September 14th). An analysis by Transparency International in 2018 of cross-border money laundering cases in the past 30 years identified a grand total of only 32 that had any connection to the Cayman Islands. One prominent example was the 1MDB case in Malaysia, a fraud so expansive that few countries with financial centres would have escaped some connection.

The Transparency International report failed to note, as did your article, that companies in the Cayman Islands have long been required to verify their owners and reveal them to law-enforcement authorities in Britain. By contrast, until recently Britain’s own vaunted register of beneficial owners relied entirely on self-reporting, leading to scores of Disney characters being recorded as owners. A high watermark indeed.

The Cayman Islands’ government has made a commitment to make beneficial ownership information available to members of the public with a legitimate interest this year, another debunking of the long-outdated stereotypes peddled by Hollywood fiction.

Steve McIntosh
Chief executive
Cayman Finance
Grand Cayman

Being female in Afghanistan

No one should be surprised that the Taliban are withdrawing the few liberties Afghan women had, one can only deplore it (“No country for women’s rights”, September 21st). Those liberties, it must be said, were available mostly for women from middle-income, well-educated families in Kabul. Yet there was hope for all and opportunity for some.

Afghanistan will be able to foster women’s rights only after it ceases to be an enclave shut off from the outside world by hostile geography and a lack of infrastructure. The Western coalition strikingly had no interest in this and failed to tackle it despite the billions of dollars poured into the country over 20 years.

Romain Poirot-Lellig
Chief of staff to the EU special representative for Afghanistan, 2008-10
Lagos

Turkey needs help

“Not wanted here” (September 14th) summarised the growing discontent in Turkey with Syrian refugees. However, one of the root causes of the refugee crisis in Turkey is the failure of the European Union to keep its promise to support the country during the emergency. Turkey is the last buffer before the EU in protecting Europe from the full repercussions of migration. Stronger economic support in this area could smooth out the weight of refugees on the Turkish economy and thus the bias against them.

Yigit Tatis
Izmir, Turkey

Paying for blood

You argued that blood donors should be paid to meet the global demand for plasma (“There must be blood”, August 31st). However, collection capacity, not donor willingness, is the limiting factor in supply. When governments invest in expanding capacity, supply also increases. Belgium experienced a 30% rise in plasma donations after launching a national plan in 2018 and Denmark more than doubled its supply by investing in extra donor centres.

Moreover, although the cost for paid plasma is low, this is because companies take blood from poorer neighbourhoods, relying on frequent donors who need the money. These savings are often offset later when drug companies use their control of the entire plasma supply chain to inflate prices of plasma-derived medicines, which carry profit margins of up to 30%. Relying on voluntary donations is more cost-effective in the long run by keeping medicine prices in check.

We should also consider the impact of payments on the safety of donors and patients. Research shows that donating twice a week weakens the immune system of blood donors. Because of mad-cow disease Britain had to destroy its own plasma and relied on imported blood from 1998 to 2021. Had Britain’s plasma in 1998 been part of a global supply chain, would we have stopped all plasma use worldwide, or would the whole world have been forced to accept the additional risk? The recent inquiry into infected blood in Britain made clear that global trade amplifies potential safety risks, with more than 30,000 patients infected by imported plasma from paid donors.

The world needs more plasma, but to increase the supply sustainably governments should invest more in public collection efforts rather than leaving this to the private sector, which will inevitably introduce payments.

PHILIPPE VANDEKERCKHOVE
Chief executive
Belgian Red Cross-Flanders
Mechelen, Belgium

Tutors in China

I agree that private tutoring in Asia is akin to an “arms-race dynamic” (“Cramming culture”, September 21st). My friends at school boast about the quality of their private tutors. We have a popular phrase in Chinese to describe this: nei juan, which means internal stress. I fear the biggest challenge for China’s youth is going to be maintaining basic mental health.

Jack Wang
Beijing

Learning from Tony Blair

Your article about the Labour government’s approach to reforming public services in 1997 did not note that Tony Blair and his ministers took time to decide how to go about these changes and their methods evolved in the light of experience (”The vision thing”, September 21st). The work of Michael Barber, an adviser, in the delivery unit was significant, but other approaches were of variable effectiveness. Sir Keir Starmer’s government has an opportunity to learn from what did and did not work, but must do so quickly if it is to succeed.

Sir Chris Ham
Professor emeritus
University of Birmingham

The forbidden fruit

You noted that there was no “apple” in the story of Adam and Eve, apple being a translator’s pun for evil (“Christianity’s sex addiction”, September 21st). In the 17th century Sir Thomas Browne pointed out that Saint Jerome’s Latin translation of the Eden story uses the word fructus (fruit) to denote the object that Eve eats.

In the seventh book of his “Pseudodoxia Epidemica” (Vulgar Errors), which debunks various mistaken beliefs, Sir Thomas found that the Latin word malum in the sense of apple appears only later in the Song of Solomon, where it seems to have no bearing on the Eden story. The true source of this misconception probably involves later translations and how meanings of words evolved over time, as shown in Azzan Yadin-Israel’s recent work, “Temptation Transformed”.

Josh Greenfield
New York

Further to your review of Diarmaid MacCulloch’s book on sex and Christianity, in my early teens my friends and I were greatly helped by a sex-education lesson at our Christian school. The priest who held the lesson, an elderly paragon of primness, reached his climax only after long embarrassed rambles round the subject, telling us to “flee like the very devil from passionate women”.

We have been on the lookout for them ever since.

Rod Tipple
Cambridge

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