NEARLY two weeks since the JEP Nfirst published damning allegations about the Jersey Financial Services Commission, the regulator has broken its silence. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, its response has been to double down.

In a verbose, muddled and achingly corporate statement, obviously pored over by a legion of well-paid public relations execs, chair Jane Platt said that the picture painted of her organisation by the JEP in recent weeks was “not one that we recognise”.

“We”, presumably, because Ms Platt – who has had a slew of non-executive directorships from London to Zurich – has only been at the regulator since April so could hardly claim to be familiar with either it, Jersey, or the Island’s finance industry at large.

That picture, for those who have been living under a rock or have not picked up the JEP recently, is one of an often remote and sometimes vindictive organisation hated by the industry it purports to regulate. An organisation that refuses to engage, and has been able to hide behind a cloak of opacity provided to it by this Island’s government for over 20 years.

There’s an almost Trumpian belligerence to the JFSC’s response, a refusal to acknowledge reality. Or, to cite an example from this side of the Atlantic, the regulator’s response is akin to that famous chant from Millwall Football Club, the black sheep of the English game for as long as any of us can remember: “No one likes us, and we don’t care.”

But there’s a sadness to it, too. Ms Platt, in not wanting to upset the apple cart, has become just another defender of “the Jersey Way”. Nothing to see here, she is saying – this is the way we’ve always done it, so this is the way it must be done.

It is just this kind of attitude to criticism of any kind that keeps people in this Island silent, cowed, afraid to speak up.

As an outsider – and as someone who has been a non-executive director at the UK Financial Conduct Authority, no less – imagine a world in which Ms Platt had said: “Yes, mistakes have clearly been made, but now we turn the page.

Imagine a world where this could have changed things for the better. Imagine she – like Deputy Ian Gorst, the minister responsible for the finance industry – had taken the views of the industry on board and vowed to address them.

This was her opportunity – the regulator’s opportunity – to start again, and it’s an opportunity lost.

To all those who shared their stories with us – and have done so in the days and weeks since we said, for the first time, that the emperor has no clothes – we apologise on the JFSC’s behalf.

It may be willing to deny your experience and your testimony, to brush your stories off like the proverbial dust on its shoulder, but we won’t. We’ll continue telling them. Until they listen.