So far, Finance Minister Paula Cox seems to have been as good as her word over the investigation into the management of the Island's public pension funds.

By requiring chairman of the Public Funds Investment Committee, Calvin White, to take a leave of absence, she has sent a message that conflicts of interest will not be tolerated and that the probe will not be a whitewash.

Even those who refuse to see must have recognised that Mr. White had a conflict of interest as the chairman of the board when the firm with which he is affiliated is a financial beneficiary of the committee's policies.

The issue here is not whether Mr. White did anything wrong or unethical while he was chairman, but that the temptation to do so was there.

In a place as small as Bermuda, conflicts of interest are inevitable. Larger countries would not tolerate a Cabinet Minister's wife being chairman of the "central bank" and even the fact that Ms Cox herself is also counsel for one of the Island's largest insurance companies while her brother is the insurance industry's regulator would raise eyebrows, as would the fact that the Minister of Home Affairs' brother is his Permanent Secretary.

Bermuda is not large enough to have the luxury of having no conflicts of these kinds. But when there is a conflict as blatant as Mr. White's then action has to be taken. The challenge, of course, is that many Government committees demand a certain level of technical expertise, and the people with the expertise may also be potential recipients of Government largesse.

That means that full disclosure is essential, but it also means that where people with the requisite expertise can be found, that there should be no chance of a conflict.

This must be possible in the pension funds sector. It should be possible to draw from the vast numbers of people with investment expertise in the exempted companies who are barred from local business. Equally, there are any umber of retired people with strong investment knowledge ? and a public and personal interest as pension recipients that they can ensure the funds earn good returns.

So Ms Cox was right to make this decision. It is now important that the Finance Ministry should go beyond what was a relatively easy first step to probing the murkier areas of allegations of conflicts of interest among current and former Cabinet Ministers and determining to what degree, if any, they wrongly used their influence.

Pension management is too important an area for there to be even a whiff of scandal surrounding it.

While the funds have had good returns in the last two to three years, they have only recently returned to their pre-2001 levels, after which time they took a bath during a prolonged bear market.

The bottom line is this: In spite of the good returns recently recorded, both the Government Superannuation Fund and the Contributory Pension Fund face a future when payments will exceed contributions as the number of pensioners increase.

That means that the management of the funds must be beyond reproach and the Government must be able to assure the public that there is not even a hint of favouritism. For that reason, the investigation must be as thorough and wide-ranging as possible.