Special purpose vehicle
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The special purpose vehicle, or espievie[1] is a unique species of joint stock company, first discovered in the wild in the lush forests of George Town, Grand Cayman by the Scottish naturalist A. J. N. Calder in 1926. For many years it was believed that the local genus, consortium restrictum culpam caymanium — the “Common” or “Cayman Exempted” Espievie — was unique, but naturalists found variant species in other islands[2]. For many years the species was understood to be indigenous to the Caribbean, until pioneering Jersey botanist Ichabod Mourant discovered a colony of Oeics[3] or “Oik” nesting in the archive stacks of Guernsey’s Library for the Illiterate.
The espievie was first bred in captivity in a famous scientific collaboration between Calder and the brothers Godfrey and Maginot Maple, then working in the George Ugland’s zoological menagerie in George Town. The site is occupied today by Ugland House, 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.
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, and the less said about synthetic CDOs the better.
See also
- Cayman Islands
- Ugland House
- SPVs in Ireland
- Enron and its benighted raptors
Important disclaimer: The author has never been to the Cayman Islands, and he’s hardly going to get an invitation now. There is, therefore, much fantastical speculation in this article and you should assume it is, at the very least, mostly false.
References
- ↑ Known in accounting circles, for some reason, as an espiecie — rest assured it is the same beast.
- ↑ L. B. G. T. Appleby discovering the Giant Bermudan espievie in Bermuda in 1929, and Herbert Fonesca discovering the Panamanian Film espievie in 1953.
- ↑ a word derived from the Jèrriais for “imaginary legal entity” and pronounced “Oik”