One of the reasons Mr Straw commissioned the Edwards report is that Jersey's regulatory system has recently attracted criticism from a group of international investors who lost money in an investment fraud, discovered in late 1993, involving the Jersey arm of Bank Cantrade, a subsidiary of the Union Bank of Switzerland.

ECONOMIST: Offshore financial centres

Still, the crisis made it painfully clear that the world's banking system needed new international rules to impose lending discipline and guard against any temptation to migrate to the weakest regulatory regime.

ECONOMIST: Finance