This week marks the 25th anniversary of OffshoreAlert being launched on February 24th, 1997. Since then, OffshoreAlert or its publisher have been sued for defamation in Canada, Cayman Islands, England, Grenada, Panama, and United States, two of them criminal, and received several death threats.
In our early years, the total amount we spent on our own legal fees exceeded the entire annual revenue of the company. If we were to be around for the long term, we had to make fraudsters afraid of us. We achieved this by helping to put them behind bars, freeze their assets, and never taking a backwards step. They soon got the message, to the point where we are seldom threatened any more, much less actually sued.
OffshoreAlert was initially a monthly newsletter that was distributed by broadcast fax, a method that was soon ditched after we received our first monthly fax bill of $20,000. So you can see our dramatic transformation between then and now, here are links to our first two editions (First Edition, Second Edition).
Particularly hilarious is a letter to the editor in the second edition from a resident of the Turks and Caicos Islands who objected to our description of his country as the ‘Totally Corrupt Islands’ in our first edition. “If the balance of your efforts bear no more resemblance to reality than those with respect to the TCI I suggest the existence of the letter will be brief and its demise swift, just and certain,” he wrote. A mere 12 years later, the TCI Government was suspended and the country taken over by the United Kingdom essentially for being ‘Totally Corrupt’. OffshoreAlert, on the other hand, is thriving!
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