Read Online The Silent Oligarch: A Novel by Christopher Morgan Jones - Free Book Online
Authors: Christopher Morgan Jones
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Americans. The unnamed others. With unassailable authority, indefatigable, righteous, rooting out the wrongdoers and sending them to jail. But if Lock went down, so would Malin, and Malin, therefore, wouldn’t let him. Therefore he was safe. There was logic to this. For a brief time he even welcomed the idea of relinquishing control of this mess to Kesler.
O VER THE COURSE of the next six days Lock tried to tell Kesler everything. Six days and five evenings with Kesler, Griffin and the junior, describing a professional lifetime of routine, dishonest transactions. Almost a whole week in Bryson’s offices. Bored but nervous, he insisted on sitting opposite the large window that looked east toward Liverpool Street, so that while he talked he could watch London become lower and sparser as it faded into the east, finally giving hints of the countryside beyond. It was hot out there, clearly, but in their conference room (still quite a sizable one, Lock noted—he might no longer be a client, he might even be a criminal, but at least his boss was important enough to run up impressive fees) the temperature was steadily just above chilly.
Lock didn’t have access to his files, but this hardly mattered because he knew it all. He explained to Kesler that his first piece of work for Malin had been in 1993, when Malin was head of the Ministry of Industry and Energy’s Transportation department. He had told Lock that he wanted to take advantage of some opportunities in the private sector, and for this would need an offshore company capable of making investments in Russia. It would also need an offshore bank account, into which payments could be made. This first company was Spirecrest Holdings, now defunct, and it had been a minor mistake. It had soon been replaced by a Cyprus company, Arctec Holdings, which for a while had done exactly what Malin had wanted. Money from Russia flowed into it and was then funneled back into Russia, to be invested in small independent gas producers and oil equipment manufacturers.
Kesler wanted to know where the money had come from. Lock explained that at the beginning he didn’t really know. He only saw payments coming in. His job wasn’t to worry about where the money was made but simply to process it and make sure it didn’t attract the attention of the taxman—or anyone else. He knew that payments were sometimes made in cash (in the days when cash wasn’t a problem), sometimes from other offshore companies, sometimes from more established Western companies, but in every case its precise origin he could only guess.
Arctec had had the most simple of structures. It had few assets—cash, mainly, safely stowed in a Swiss account—and was owned by a Liechtenstein anstalt, a particularly impenetrable form of company which was in turn owned by a Liechtenstein trust: Longway Trust, the beneficiary of which was not named. Any taxman or investigator trying to find out who owned Arctec would be lucky to get as far as Liechtenstein, but there would meet a thick wall of impenetrable Mitteleuropean discretion.
Arctec would have taken a morning, at most, to discuss. Now, though, the whole affair was very much more complex. It was its own world. Faringdon Holdings, right in the middle, held assets in over forty different companies in Russia and its neighbors. Up above it was a consortium of nine shareholders, each of which owned a roughly equal share. These shareholders were companies registered in the British Virgin Islands, in Cayman, in Malta, in Gibraltar, all over. Lock had set up each of these and each one had its own shareholders in many different places. And above these was another layer still, every company lovingly incorporated by Lock. Draw the whole thing, and it would look like an hourglass, if you stood far enough back. Finally, when it seemed like there was no end to it, everything came together in the airless heights of the scheme in the only constant, Longway, the same unbreakable trust
O VER THE COURSE of the next six days Lock tried to tell Kesler everything. Six days and five evenings with Kesler, Griffin and the junior, describing a professional lifetime of routine, dishonest transactions. Almost a whole week in Bryson’s offices. Bored but nervous, he insisted on sitting opposite the large window that looked east toward Liverpool Street, so that while he talked he could watch London become lower and sparser as it faded into the east, finally giving hints of the countryside beyond. It was hot out there, clearly, but in their conference room (still quite a sizable one, Lock noted—he might no longer be a client, he might even be a criminal, but at least his boss was important enough to run up impressive fees) the temperature was steadily just above chilly.
Lock didn’t have access to his files, but this hardly mattered because he knew it all. He explained to Kesler that his first piece of work for Malin had been in 1993, when Malin was head of the Ministry of Industry and Energy’s Transportation department. He had told Lock that he wanted to take advantage of some opportunities in the private sector, and for this would need an offshore company capable of making investments in Russia. It would also need an offshore bank account, into which payments could be made. This first company was Spirecrest Holdings, now defunct, and it had been a minor mistake. It had soon been replaced by a Cyprus company, Arctec Holdings, which for a while had done exactly what Malin had wanted. Money from Russia flowed into it and was then funneled back into Russia, to be invested in small independent gas producers and oil equipment manufacturers.
Kesler wanted to know where the money had come from. Lock explained that at the beginning he didn’t really know. He only saw payments coming in. His job wasn’t to worry about where the money was made but simply to process it and make sure it didn’t attract the attention of the taxman—or anyone else. He knew that payments were sometimes made in cash (in the days when cash wasn’t a problem), sometimes from other offshore companies, sometimes from more established Western companies, but in every case its precise origin he could only guess.
Arctec had had the most simple of structures. It had few assets—cash, mainly, safely stowed in a Swiss account—and was owned by a Liechtenstein anstalt, a particularly impenetrable form of company which was in turn owned by a Liechtenstein trust: Longway Trust, the beneficiary of which was not named. Any taxman or investigator trying to find out who owned Arctec would be lucky to get as far as Liechtenstein, but there would meet a thick wall of impenetrable Mitteleuropean discretion.
Arctec would have taken a morning, at most, to discuss. Now, though, the whole affair was very much more complex. It was its own world. Faringdon Holdings, right in the middle, held assets in over forty different companies in Russia and its neighbors. Up above it was a consortium of nine shareholders, each of which owned a roughly equal share. These shareholders were companies registered in the British Virgin Islands, in Cayman, in Malta, in Gibraltar, all over. Lock had set up each of these and each one had its own shareholders in many different places. And above these was another layer still, every company lovingly incorporated by Lock. Draw the whole thing, and it would look like an hourglass, if you stood far enough back. Finally, when it seemed like there was no end to it, everything came together in the airless heights of the scheme in the only constant, Longway, the same unbreakable trust
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