Government oversight of the Cayman Islands' international business sector runs in parallel to Bermuda's, much of the time.

Bermuda has a Premier; Cayman has a Chief Secretary at the Portfolio of Internal and External Affairs, a name Gilbert & Sullivan might have coined, which covers areas the responsibility, in Bermuda, of the Premier, the Minister of Labour & Home Affairs and some of the work of the Minister of Development & Opportunity.

Both British Overseas Territories have a Finance Minister. In the Caymans, that man is George McCarthy. His role is broadly similar to that of Eugene Cox. Both islands have a Monetary Authority, nominally independent from the Government which appoints it. The Authority in both places is responsible for vetting the international business sector.

"Vetting'' must be an English term, since not all Americans are familiar with it. In this context, its nearest TransAtlantic equivalent is "anticipatory character analysis and background check''.

In Cayman, the individual currently responsible for administrative oversight of Caymans' insurance sector is William McCullough, a tall, friendly fellow who makes a point of being available to reporters and anyone else who might need him, which he proved by seeing this reporter on short notice.

Mr. McCullough, known to one and all as 'Bill', is about to retire and head out to Australia. A Brit, now in his early 60s, he was once with Lloyd's name Minets, who sent him to run their operations in Nigeria and then Malaysia for three year-terms. New Zealand followed for a few years, before "opting out and going back to underwriting.'' That didn't mean a return to pinstripes and the City of London, but an appointment in a somewhat different environment, as managing director of the New Guinea Insurance Corporation (NGIC) in Papua, New Guinea. Some join the Navy to see the world; Mr. McCullough joined the insurance industry.

He worked subsequently in Australia and in the Government offices in Bahrain, where he had responsibility for the regulatory system. "Bahrain licences most of the companies in Saudi, partly for religious reasons,'' Mr. McCullough said. From Bahrain, he planned to retire and went so far as to build a house out in Australia three years ago, but could not resist one final term as the Caymans' head of insurance supervision.

No one in Cayman says a bad word about Bill, and most have some very nice words to say. The phrase "hard act to follow'' crops up all the time. No word has come as yet as to who his successor will be, but the search is on. Whoever lands the job will inherit an insurance community ticking over at a good speed.

In response to a request for recent statistics, Mr. McCullough made a telephone call.

Parallels with the Caymans Within five minutes, the latest set of company incorporation details, a comprehensive package of information, had been delivered to the reporter from elsewhere in the building.

The figures were just five minutes out of date, having been prepared in real-time in response to Mr. McCullough's phone call.

If you harbour the suspicion that Mr. McCullough's statistics are smaller than Bermuda's and therefore easier to keep current, you would only partly be right.

Cayman had 497 captives on September 13, 1999 -- Bill is hoping to register "his'' 500th before retiring on October 31.

And unless very much had changed in the five minutes since the statistics were run off, Cayman had $11,862,835,577 of assets in its insurance sector at the same date.

Mr. McCullough has pioneered an interesting approach to the public/private sector partnership more or less invented in Bermuda.

Whereas here, generally, ideas are presented to Government fully-blown, with attendant loose ends tied up and neatly wrapped, in Cayman, the Government is consulted at an earlier phase of the development of ideas.

This is possible because Cayman has a smaller bureaucracy and because Mr.

McCullough has made it plain to the insurance community that he will turn projects down.

Why waste the development money, he says, if the idea is doomed to failure anyway? One local insurance manager recalled: "I had a client come to me with a new way of looking at an aspect of the insurance market, which he and I took to Bill just as soon as the client arrived in town.'' The outcome? "Bill took a day or two, and came back with some caveats, which we were able to accommodate.

"The client then put his people into finishing it all off, and when we came to present the company for incorporation, there were no problems.'' The sound you hear is that of offshore commerce at work.

Next: Those statistics in full.

Photos by David Wolfe Bill McCullough: The Cayman Islands' top insurance regulator.