There were those who explained what secrecy is, and how it helps the criminals, those who explained that there is a distinction between secrecy and confidentiality, those who argued for complete transparency of financial affairs (especially with regard to enforcement agencies), those who see secrecy and confidentiality as an affront to their sovereign laws and those who see any attack on their right to maintain secrecy and confidentiality as a similar attack on sovereignty.

The Cambridge Symposium lasts a week, and it is a very full week. It is simply impossible to attend all the relevant papers in the main hall and workshops on several sites. And as if time and geography were not enough, there is the slight problem of social life getting in the way. By the end of the week, people have begun to drop out of the formal dinners, favouring pizza and beer down the road where relaxation can be more easily found; faces are greyer at breakfasts and the sprightly walk between the various centres becomes more of a trudge, delegates can be seen sitting outside coffee bars, or sauntering into shops as the enormity of the available information - and the pointlessness of trying to get it all - hits them. Quite simply, there is three week's worth of delivery crammed into one week.

The fact that speakers' papers are not prepared long enough in advance to be made available, and that some speakers are precious about their papers and will not allow them to be published at the Symposium, makes it difficult to keep up and, in the main hall, Cambridge's wonderful Guildhall, those operating the sound system struggled to make it effective and many of those speaking were, quite simply hopeless public speakers (despite in many cases speaking for a living) with the result that much of what some speakers was entirely lost on the audience.

So, if it is so awful, why do people return to this Symposium year after year, and why do so many crave a speaking slot?

Actually, it is because, despite all of the above, it is actually one of the most valuable conferences anywhere in the World. Sure, some of the speakers are not up to scratch but there are so many that there's always another one along in ten minutes. Of course, there are the speakers that have paid to be there, rather than made it on merit, but that is one way of keeping the cost to delegates at a small fraction of commercial conferences. They are easy to spot, and their contributions are usually vacuous and a cue for a break to the coffee bar. But the vast majority of speakers are there because they know their stuff and can communicate it, despite all of the adversities outlined above.

It was almost inevitable that the question of secrecy would focus on the twin planks of banking and professional organisations, and that the attention would narrow down to offshore centres. Given the fact that the British Government had commissioned Andrew Edwards to prepare a report on the offshore jurisdictions in the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man, and that that report has largely been (mis)interpreted as heavily critical of those centres, it was especially interesting to hear Mr Edwards' view that "Most of the world's crime is orchestrated from onshore centres including the major centres; most onshore centres are quite as bad, or worse, than the better offshore groups" and "most of the crime would have happened anyway, and the proceeds been hidden, without offshore centres."

Elsewhere in this issue, it is shown that resources to fight crime are insufficient. Mr Edwards agrees with that and in his wish list for urgent needs are "use of technology to combat the criminals' technology."

Rosalind Wright, director of the UK's serious fraud office, said that "many jurisdictions make a virtue of confidential banking [and] in some it is enshrined in their law." She went on to say that the authorities in the UK were not prepared to let money laundering continue where it could be stopped but also accepted that where money laundering is concerned, there is a preference to prosecute the predicate offence, including a conspiracy to commit the predicate offence, rather than proceed under counter-money laundering legislation where that option arises.

John Moscow of the New York District Attorney's office was one of several speakers who pointed out that the distinction between onshore and offshore jurisdictions was largely illusory: "everywhere is offshore to everywhere else" he said.

And so it is: by almost any definition of "offshore", one of the most "offshore" jurisdictions is landlocked Switzerland. Dr Daniel Heini, of Union Bank of Switzerland made it plain that Swiss Bank Secrecy was largely a myth, explaining that the so called numbered account is in fact backed up by records which are accessible only by a small number of senior bank staff, thereby rendering leakage by the general staff impossible. But, when required to do so by proper authority, banks can, and will, release the information they are ordered to. And Paul Gully-Hart, a lawyer in Geneva, cited the case of an unpublished judgment of the Swiss Federal Tribunal (the most senior Swiss Court) supported a decision by an Examining Magistrate in the Canton of Geneva which disregarded bank secrecy and ordered the seizure of bank records that related to the an account held by an offshore company to the benefit of a close associate of the President of Gabon. The request for information came from the French Government. In addition to the question of bank secrecy, the person claimed diplomatic immunity as he happened to be married to Gabon's Ambassador to Switzerland. The decision was that there might have been diplomatic immunity had the account been held by the person directly, but that the intervening offshore company created a distance and that the Law could walk through it.

The most pointed remark from the Symposium was, perhaps, that made by Mr Saul Froomkin, former Attorney General of Bermuda: “States that sell secrecy to criminals and terrorists prostitute their sovereignty."