Ian Allsop has recently returned from Costa Rica, but he definitely does not use any offshore investment vehicles.

As hinted at last time out, I was going to write about everyone’s favourite mad-haired New-York-born politician this month. And I don’t mean Boris. While the Charity Commission has yet to issue, let alone revise, guidance on what charities should do in the event of Trump making the White House (and surely they would ignore any nuances around political campaigning if it helped prevent it), I still thought I could get 800 words musing on what his sustained and inexplicable popularity means for the voluntary sector.

I even had the perfect pay-off line, based on something that happened while I was on holiday recently – “who takes a drone to a waterfall?” – which I thought I could easily shoehorn in to tie the whole thing together, and create the illusion that I actually write these things with a coherent idea of what I am trying to say.

But events elsewhere, as usual, overtook me, and I find I must begin by making a full disclosure in the interest of transparency. I do not, never have, and probably never will, have any columns stashed away in shady offshore investment vehicles. I do have approx. AUS$2,000 tied up in a superannuation plan, from when I worked in Sydney over 20 years ago, but that is it.

When the Panama papers story broke, I was, as alluded to above, on holiday. In Costa Rica. Which is NEXT DOOR TO PANAMA. Like any good investigative journalist I was literally almost ON THE SPOT. Even if I was getting my information via the BBC news website in London.

On reflection, though, the only really shocking thing about the revelations that the rich and powerful are dodgy and use bad methods to make even more money, was that the law firm were so stupid as to have been exposed in this way in the first place. They should have kept the documents safer, perhaps utilising the secrecy principles that were applied to all that money.

Communication challenges

A few years ago I probably wouldn’t have heard about the story at all until I got home. For one thing it was harder to stay in touch with news while in foreignland, and I have always felt that if I am on holiday I want to cut myself off from the real world. Furthermore, before we set off to Costa Rica I didn’t know how much access we would have to wifi and the like.

I had had a dress rehearsal for information isolation a week before we went when somebody ploughed their car into the telegraph pole outside our house. Luckily no one was hurt, although my car suffered some damage as a massive stick with wires attached flew through the air onto its bonnet.

As it turned out there was wifi everywhere in Costa Rica, although their casual attitude to security, in a reflection of the Tico culture’s mantra of pura vida, would have given the former IT stalwart columnist Mr Tate myriad palpitations.

Passwords to access wifi at hotels included “abc12345”, which is so last century. Come on Costa Rica. Get with it. You may not have an army but that doesn’t mean you should be lax with all security. It is 2016. Everyone knows the default non-date-of-birth password is now “Password1!”.

So anyway, I did have access to the interwebs, and I must confess that I checked email and ended up commissioning a technical briefing piece from my favourite gift aid expert with two names relating to the Welsh coast. While sitting next to the Pacific one.

Visions of the future

Apart from anything else I thought it might be fun to guess what stories would occur when I was away. “Self-regulation debate takes surprising new twist as fundraising accidentally makes itself illegal.” “Shock as household-name charity is forced to defend itself from absence of any damaging tabloid front-page exposé”. “New report from True and Fair Foundation says that all charities smell, especially the large ones, who really pong. Like your Mum.”

Actually, I am surprised that Gina Miller hasn’t produced a report condemning charities in the wake of the Panama papers. As it is disgraceful that they haven’t been maximising investment returns on donors’ hard-earned cash by squirrelling it away in complex offshore accounts. Nor have they even attempted to be up-front about the fact that they haven’t done so.

Ian Allsop is a freelance editor and journalist, and regular contributor to Charity Finance