“No Bad Sharks in Bim”: Kendall Roy, Offshore Capital, and Caribbean Reparations
On the series finale of the HBO television series Succession, a frantic Kendall Roy — onetime heir to the fictional Waystar Royco media empire — directs his private jet to an unnamed Caribbean destination. Desperate to secure the votes of his estranged siblings, Siobhan and Roman, and to block the takeover of his late father’s company by a Swedish media conglomerate, Kendall rendezvous at his mother’s seaside villa.
At first glance, the modest hills cascading over the bay do not reveal the exact location of the Caribbean landscape. In line with Succession as a premium cable soap opera filled with elite corporate intrigue, a casual viewer might assume their surroundings to be a favored tourist destination of the uber-rich such as St. Barts or well-known offshore banking hubs of Grand Cayman, Aruba, and the Virgin Islands. As the camera descends from the shoreline panorama, our first glimpses of the minimalist black and white license plates and Mount Gay Rum-branded sign on a roadside bar offer the confirmation of our location in the Republic of Barbados.
Aside from this short B-Roll footage, the images of Bimshire — a British colonial moniker for Barbados — are limited to the Lady Collingwood estate. At this grand retreat, Kendall succeeds (if only for the moment) in squashing rivalries to assure his presumptive candidacy as company chief. Kendall’s siblings confirm his coronation on a buoy floating gently in the bay. Before a celebratory dive into the Caribbean Sea, Kendall reassures his hesitant siblings: “There’s no bad sharks in Bim, baby. They’re North Atlantic.” They follow suit and Roman endorses their compact: “We anoint you. You get the bauble. Congratulations.”
OPEN FOR BUSINESS
The fictional drama of Succession betrays uncomfortable truths. How does Barbados come to serve as the cinematic backdrop for the fraternal conflicts of privileged heirs and the corporate governance of multinational media outlets? Kendall insists that the calm waters of Barbados are free of maritime predators. Yet his “bad sharks” bear a double meaning. Even as an independent republic, Barbados operates as an offshore finance haven and choice destination for metropolitan capital. In this light, the location of the Collingwood villa comes into sharper view. In Barbados, corporate tax rates are capped at 5.5% and bottom at a fully exempt rate of 0% for the wealthiest investors. Capital gains taxes are nonexistent. Friendly fiscal provisions of this sort attract the interest and dollars of a Western billionaire class. The fictional Roy family emulates this flight of capital to the offshore havens of the Caribbean. In Bim, neither the sharks nor the tax man will bite them.
Aside from its brief cameo Succession, Barbados has entered North American media coverage as the vanguard of the CARICOM Reparations Commission currently seeking recompense from the British Government for the violence and exploitation of plantation slavery in the Anglophone Caribbean. A TIME magazine cover story, “Inside Barbados’ Historic Push for Slavery Reparations” makes the case clearly. In a thoughtful and evocative feature, TIME Senior Correspondent Janell Ross demonstrates how the history of plantation slavery is inscribed on a Bajan landscape where colonial sugar plantations remain intact and the descendants of enslaved Africans face persistent inequities in income, poverty, unemployment, and health outcomes. Ross applauds the work of the CARICOM Reparations commission as it prepares a revised 10-point plan for imminent release to the public. Moreover, she accurately characterizes the growing legacy of Bajan Prime Minister Mia Mottley as an immensely popular head of state who “has proved adept at linking seemingly disparate phenomena” such as histories of plantation slavery and contemporary climate catastrophe.
Elsewhere, I locate Mottley as the figurehead of a masquerade in which her populist rhetoric and strategic deployment of entertainment celebrities masks a tacit compact with local and multinational capital. Much to her credit, Ross does not shy away from references to this compact. As she underscores, “This is an island where private businesses remain overwhelmingly owned by white Bajans.” Still, the relationship between Mottley, the CARICOM Reparations Commission, and such “white Bajans” is not specified.
Ross advances the case for reparations in the Caribbean convincingly. On the one hand, Ross offers detailed portraits of Black Bajan laborers and citizens, particularly those who live and toil in the area of the infamous Drax Hall plantation in St. George. On the other, we are left without an equally concerted inquiry into the stories of the white Bajans who have disproportionately controlled the local private sector throughout the nation’s history. Indeed, any tensions between the ordinary toilers that Ross carefully profiles and the CARICOM Reparations Commission are omitted from her account. In a masquerade of its own, TIME offers the impression that the desires for reparations articulated by ordinary people and the clamors for reparations by Mottley’s government are one and the same. The current disposition of the government toward its working people offers a glimpse of what we should expect as the case for reparations proceeds. What part are the working people of Drax Hall permitted to play on the CARICOM Reparations Commission? Are they invited to advance their own proposals for reparations or offered as mere adornment — a mask, if you will — for the development schemes of national governments and wealth accumulation by local private sector elites?
Indeed, if Barbados is a place where the fictional Roys and their real-life counterparts find safe refuge from the sharks of federal taxes — a phenomenon exposed most dramatically by the release of the Panama Papers in 2016 — who stands to benefit from a reparations program led by the governments of CARICOM? The working people of Drax Hall or the financiers and “white Bajans” who appear surreptitiously before falling out of TIME’s narrative view?
Again, we cannot know how a successful reparations program will play out for Barbados and its fellow claimants. What we do know is that Mottley’s insistent rhetoric in support of reparations is not met with equally direct policies in service of the working people of Barbados. Mottley, indeed, plays the trickster quite well by holding court with the International Monetary Fund and People’s Republic of China President Xi Jinping. Her success in diplomatic forums and courtship of private capital and state capital financing indicates that Barbados is open for business on the preferential terms of its corporate tax regime. (Indeed, the opening line of the InvestBarbados welcome page reads, “Barbados is open for business.”)
LOCALS NEED NOT APPLY
And it is not only billionaires and multinational corporations that are invited to enjoy the delights of Bim. In June 2020, the Barbados Government announced a 12-month “Welcome Stamp” for remote workers to relocate to Barbados under a new visa program. The visa is advertised for remote employees whose work is location independent and who reside “outside of Barbados.” Recipients of the Welcome Stamp visa are not liable to pay Barbados Income Tax but must make an annual income of at least US$50,000 to be eligible for consideration.
The header image for the Welcome Stamp website plays explicitly on the desires of many middle class North Americans and Europeans to approximate the life of luxury led by jet-setting billionaires. “WORK REMOTELY FROM PARADISE FOR A YEAR…” the banner text beckons as a woman perches her remote work laptop from a beachside view. Indeed, the very audiences that flocked to Succession as voyeurs to the fictionalized lives of the billionaire Roy family are invited to join them in their flight to Bim. Locals need not apply.
The case for reparations is clear. But the march toward reparations must be led by the working people of Drax Hall (and the Caribbean) themselves if it is to succeed in marking a break from the colonial past and neocolonial present. As CARICOM convenes its Reparations Commission and finalizes its new 10-point plan, Caribbean people must remain steadfast in holding their own neighborhood and workplace assemblies to articulate independent proposals for reparations and the new society.
