Liberal Vannin leader Kate Beecroft has told a committee looking at losses suffered by the island’s film fund that she is not only concerned about the money.
Mrs Beecroft was speaking to the public accounts committee which is exploring whether further investigation is needed into the more than £26m losses incurred by the media development fund and whether changes to ’governance procedures’ are needed.
The Douglas South MHK has long been critical of the losses and often asked Treasury Minister Alfred Cannan questions about the money and how it was spent.
Mrs Beecroft told the committee that ’no matter what the spin put on the reasons for funding film projects has been and no matter how determined the obfuscation employed, facts are there to be found’.
And she claimed that ’some in the House of Keys have already decided that investigating events that have caused the loss of over £26m from the media development fund is throwing good money after bad’.
However, it is the issue of how and why decisions are made that Mrs Beecroft focussed on. She said: ’What this committee has to consider in the details I submit, is more than why did the media development fund lose such a large amount of money?
’But what is it in the system of government that appears to be deficient that it makes it difficult, if not impossible, to apply checks on the expenditure before yet another example is added to the list of projects that have caused the expenditure and loss of mutli-millions of pounds of tax payers’s money to little or no benefit to them.’
Mrs Beecroft added that it is ’not easy to face the difficult changes’ needed but warned that if the committee didn’t then they or another committee would have to ’sift through the wreckage of yet another project that has cost millions of pounds of tax payers’ money’.
In total, £20.6m was written off on films made during the time CinemaNX was managing the Media Development Fund. And a further £6.2m was written off in the same period on films when government had relied on Pinewood advisors.
CinemaNX invested £39.7m in films between 2007 and 2012, recouping only £16.8m with the most famous example being the Zac Efron film ’Me and Orson Welles’, which was partially filmed in the island, losing about £9m.
Using the example of the Zac Efron film, Mrs Beecroft said that questions surrounding why the film was picked to be funded and what deal was made with the makers of it remain unanswered. She added that the island’s dip into the film industry had ’not been of benefit to the people of the Isle of Man’.