Special purpose vehicle

The Jolly Contrarian’s Dictionary The snippy guide to financial services lingo.™ →Go uptown An espievie going about its charitable purposes yesterday Index — Click ᐅ to expand: Dictionary Tell me more Sign up for our newsletter — or just get in touch: for ½ a weekly 🍺 you get to consult JC. Ask about it here.

Special purpose vehicle /ˈspɛʃ(ə)l ˈpəːpəs ˈviːɪk(ə)/ (n.)
A unique species of joint stock company first discovered in the lush forests of George Town, Grand Cayman by dour Scottish naturalist A. J. N. Calder in 1926.

For many years Calder believed the creature he had found — genus consortium restrictum culpam caymanium, the “Common” or “Cayman Exempted” Espievie — was unique in the world.

Discovery

Calder’s, and our, world was repeatedly rocked over the next thirty years as naturalists found variants elsewhere: first, not far from the Caribbean, L. B. G. T. Appleby discovered the Bermudan reinsurance espievie in 1939.

Fourteen years later, retired botanist Herbert Fonesca came across neat piles of tax losses when on a forest walk with his grand-children which the children traced all the way to back to a mating pair of concealed film espievies, of a type never before seen in Panama.

Then, in 1964, Jersey paleontologist Ichabod Mourant discovered a colony of “Oeics” (the word is derived from the Jèrriais for “imaginary legal entity” and is pronounced “Oik”) nesting in the archive stacks of Guernsey’s Library for the Illiterate. Since then espievies have proven robust migrants and flourished in many fiscal climates.

Domestication

The espievie was first bred in captivity in a famous scientific collaboration between Calder and the Godfrey and Maginot Maple brothers, then working in the George Ugland’s zoological menagerie in George Town. The site is occupied today by the Ugland House orphanage, which is headquarters of an industrial breeding programme for espievies of all kinds, meaning that the continued survival of this freak of financial biology is, for the foreseeable future, assured.

Modern use

Most espievies are harmless and even friendly and can be useful around the garden, mulching up tax liabilities and so on. But occasionally they turn nasty. Poor Andrew Fastow was hounded to prison by three of his own raptors. Herbert Fonseca successfully bred Panamanian tax espievies for nearly sixty years, until an unfortunate leakage of publicity wiped out the whole population, and his laboratory, in 2016.

See also

• Cayman Islands
• Ugland House
• SPVs in Ireland
• Enron and its benighted raptors