The governing body of the Cayman Islands has voted to pull advertising from one of the territory’s leading newspapers over its reporting of the Fifa scandal.
The decision was taken on Monday after the Cayman Compass had published an editorial the previous Wednesday criticising Cayman leaders over their slow response to allegations of bribery within world football’s governing body, specifically those surrounding Jeffrey Webb, who as president of Concacaf and the Cayman Islands Football Association (Cifa) was one of the Fifa officials arrested by US authorities in Zurich last month. He has subsequently been replaced in his role at Cifa by the vice-president Bruce Blake.
The editorial was described by governing officials as “a full-frontal assault on the Cayman Islands and its people”, with the legislator Arden McLean, who brought the motion to cease commercial activity with the Compass, saying directing to the publisher David Legge: “Stop destroying our country and running it down. Tombstones? We have to be careful about how we plant them and whose name appears upon them.”
Legge and his wife Vicki, the Compass’s co-publisher, have been placed under police protection and have left the island temporarily.
The motion was supported 11-0 by the legislators present on Monday. It stated: “Be it therefore resolved that this honourable finance committee condemn the editorial of Wednesday 3 June, 2015, and the subsequent actions of the Cayman Compass, the island’s only daily newspaper, by resolving to immediately cease all government advertising or any other commercial activity by ministries, portfolios, departments, government entities, government owned companies and statutory authorities with the Cayman Compass, its parent company, if any, and its affiliates.”
