Rewards and Fairies

It may be an offshore tax haven, a center for high finance and home to more than 60 banks, but the Isle of Man remains a down-to-earth place. Exile millionaires live quietly amid the 72,000 Manx residents, and the sense of affluence that pervades its sister tax havens, like the more southerly and glamorous Channel Islands, is less evident in this wind-battered scrap of land lying roughly equidistant from England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. "We have a northern, gritty approach to things here," says John Cashen, chief financial officer to the Manx Treasury. "We have to work harder for every...