Trail of Greed: Fighting Fraud and Corruption... A Dangerous Game (4 page)

We still had the eighteenth to play. It’s actually not a difficult hole when you know it. Seeing it for the first time, however, it looks rather daunting. As you stand on the tee with the flag in the distance waving in front of the clubhouse you’re starting to think of that nice cold beer. But between you and that beer there is a drive across an immense dip in the ground which stretches completely across the course in front of you and is all rough. To reach the fairway there is a carry of about a hundred and fifty yards but it looks more. If you don’t make it you’re dead. It is full of hillocks and patches of heather and the only clear ground is the path that wends its way through this mess of vegetation.

Pierre looked at it with apprehension. I wasn’t going to tell him the distance. It looks further than it really is. I grinned at him.

“All square and one to play?”

“Sure – no problem.” It was my honour. On a good day I could clear it with a four iron but that would be giving away the fact that it was not as long as it looked. So I took out my three wood and fortunately hit a clean one straight up the middle. You can’t see it bounce on the other side but I knew I was fine.

Pierre was up next. “I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me the distance to the fairway?”

Mike and I exchanged glances. Two smiles and two shakes of the head.

He had seen the club I had taken. He knew that I hit the ball just a little bit longer than he did. What he didn’t know, and I did, was that I had landed probably fifty yards clear of the rubbish in front of us.

He teed up his ball, hesitated a bit over his choice of club and finally plumped for the driver.

We could feel the tension and the nervousness as he started his back swing. Unfortunately for him he forced his shot. The hands came through just a bit too quickly and, although he hit the ball cleanly with the centre of the club face, the result was a solidly hit slice. We all watched the ball curve gracefully through the air and finish up amongst the trees on the right of the fairway.

“Bad luck.” Mike and I were both very sympathetic but he realised that he had been had.

“You bastards,” he said, “That ball’s miles over.” “But not straight I’m afraid,” said Mike with a grin. “You wait. The hole’s not finished.” We wended our way down the path and up the other side in a solid spirit of comradeship. It had been an enjoyable game and Mike seemed to be getting on well with his newly acquired half-brother.

We finished the last hole in good spirits. A par for me. Pierre hit a lovely four iron out of the trees and chipped on to about four yards. Mike managed to chip in from twenty yards short of the green which made his day. We conceded Pierre’s putt, explaining that it was a tradition of the club to do so to someone who was playing the course for the first time. I don’t think he believed us but accepted it gratefully.

After stowing away our clubs in the car and changing our shoes we repaired to the bar to refresh ourselves and ease my aching muscles.

“Pints all round?” asked Mike, still looking disturbingly fresh and chirpy.

He brought them over to us at a table by the window, sat down and grinned at us. He was still basking in the glory of that twenty-yard chip on the eighteenth. All the thrashing around in the rough earlier was completely forgotten.

Pierre and I exchanged a resigned glance as he relived his moment of glory. It had been an enjoyable round and amply served its purpose. I had seen Pierre on a golf course and it had helped me confirm my initial impressions of him.

“Well, I suppose we’ll have to organise for you to meet your half-sister now. I haven’t asked you how long you’re planning to stay in Scotland.”

Pierre didn’t answer at once. He seemed to be trying to decide to say something but wasn’t sure if it was the right moment. After a pause he addressed himself to me.

“Do you remember that I told you that there were two reasons for my trip over?”

“Yes.” “Well I’d like to tell you both the second reason. I need some advice, or some help, on a financial matter here in Scotland.”

This came as a bit of a surprise. What kind of financial matter could Pierre be involved in over here?

Naturally I said I would help him if I could, little imagining the dramatic consequences that we were all about to get involved in.

A quiet beer in the bar of the club house is, I suppose, as good a place as any to be the starting point of a major change in the direction of my life. Especially at the age of sixty-six.

When I look back on it I wonder what Liz would have said if I had come home to her with the news of an unknown brother and the prospect of a much more active retirement than I had envisaged. She’d have taken it in her stride, I think. She had always been very pragmatic about my sense of adventure and my sometimes cock-eyed ideas. Much as we had had a wonderful relationship, since my retirement she had had to adjust to me being around the house much more than before and upsetting the rhythm of her life. She’d probably have welcomed anything that took me out and about.

“So how can I help, Pierre?” “Let me get us all another drink first,” he said and went over to the bar to order.

Mike looked across at me, “What do you think this is all about?”

“I haven’t a clue, but we’ll soon find out.” Pierre came back and carefully deposited the drinks on the table and sat down again.

“The other night over dinner I told you about how my father happens to be the same man you both know as your father. I was distinctly nervous as to the reaction I would get as you can probably well imagine and, if you remember, most of what we talked about was him and how it had all happened.”

“I didn’t tell you much about myself. I first of all needed to know how you would react and how we might get on with each other. The fact that we are sitting here together after a very pleasant morning, enjoying a beer, leads me to believe that you’ve both got over the shock and that we will be good friends. I certainly hope so. I’ll never be able to have the closeness with you two that you have with each other, having been brought up together within a family situation, but I hope we can get somewhere near it.”

He paused for a moment, perhaps waiting for a confirmation, or at least some kind of reaction.

Mike jumped in. “Pierre, I didn’t have the pleasure of the dinner and the wine but Bob has told me the story. He’s convinced.”

“And you?” “Don’t take this the wrong way. You’re a nice guy. You tell me that you’re my half-brother. I would like to believe you. I enjoy your company. Give me just a little more time to get used to the idea. We’ve only just met.”

“Fair enough. I can understand that. As far as I am concerned that’s enough for me to explain the second reason for me being here.”

He then proceeded to give us a quick sketch of his life – his upbringing in a village in Normandy, his schooling and his further education. He briefly told us about how he had lost his wife very soon after they were married and about his decision to throw himself into the business he had started up.

It turned out that he had been in the right place at the right time. He had, with a few friends, started up an IT company in the mid-seventies and it had been enormously successful. He had become a workaholic. All that had mattered in his life had been his company. His only real outside pursuit had been golf. To cut a long story short his original associates had one by one left the company and he had found himself as the last of the original shareholders, sitting on a lot of money. He didn’t tell us how much.

“A couple of years ago I realised that perhaps it was time to stop. My health was still good but I was getting on a bit. Why not enjoy the rest of my life?”

He was watching us closely as he developed his story. “So I sold the company and found myself, at the age of sixty-seven, with plenty of money and lots of free time on my hands. I travelled a bit for a few months and then started to think about what I was going to do. Meanwhile I had to do something with the money. I bought myself a couple of houses and invested the rest. Most of it was with banks in Switzerland, but I wanted to spread it around a bit and, because of my Scottish connection and the Scots reputation for careful investing, I thought I would put some into an Edinburgh asset management firm. I looked around and found a medium-sized outfit called Ailsa Investment Management and came over to meet them. They sounded as if they knew what they were doing.

“It’s a company that only deals with individuals and not with company money. They have a few funds, ranked by risk, and their market is the elderly individual who wants their money to be reasonably safe. The kind of people who want to hand something down to their children or grandchildren when they go but, in the meantime want to generate a reasonable revenue to add to their pension or pay for their old folk’s home or whatever.

“It sounded like it made sense to me so I invested some money with them in their medium-risk fund.”

He paused for a moment or two and took a sup of his beer.

Mike and I exchanged glances.

Pierre put his pint down carefully on the table, pulled out a handkerchief and carefully wiped his lips. He continued.

“This is where I have a problem,” he said. “I put my money in about two years ago. Since then, as I guess you know, Bob, the markets have been doing reasonably well. I looked at the returns of various similar funds around Europe and they are all performing at around six to eight per cent per annum. AIM has averaged three and a half.”

“So we Scots are not so hot after all?” I suggested. “I don’t know. I just don’t like the smell. Their quarterly reports are all very bullish and positive but the performance doesn’t match up. I tried to get details of where they had invested but just got complicated marketing speak that I couldn’t make head or tail of. I don’t have any financial expertise. Anyway, while I was doing all this digging into Dad’s background and managed to find out about you guys’ existence, I discovered that you had a financial background. So I wondered if I could ask you for some help or advice.”

Naturally I replied that I would be quite happy to do what I could to assist.

“In what way do you think I can help?” I asked. “I’m not quite sure yet. I have a feeling that the guy that runs this outfit is, let’s say, not totally above board. It doesn’t seem logical to underperform like that. But maybe there’s more to it.”

“What do you mean?” “Well, he steers clear of the corporate money – perhaps so that he doesn’t have professionals to deal with. He specifically targets elderly individuals. Most of them are probably not very money conscious. Perhaps half of them are already in retirement homes or starting to suffer from dementia. It would be relatively easy to bamboozle them with science.”

“You mean that perhaps his fund is performing perfectly well and he is skimming off a chunk for himself?”

“Exactly. When you think about it, the medium-risk fund is worth fifty million pounds. Let’s say he is actually getting a return of six or seven per cent and is only admitting to three and a half per cent – which is a figure that probably would satisfy most of his investors – then the difference of, say, three and a half per cent is a tidy sum. In fact it’s one and three-quarter millions.”

“Shit!” said Mike, waking up to what Pierre was explaining.

I could see the scenario. And it wouldn’t be the first financial scam. Man’s ingenuity to mount schemes to fleece innocent investors goes back centuries.

If the company was run by a crook who had no morals or was just outright greedy, Pierre could be right. Most of these people relied on “professional” advice and if the company was smooth and convincing it could work. I didn’t know how much regulation there was in the industry but I suspected there would be ways round whatever rules existed. And if you had bent accountants who, for a higher than usual fee, would sign off the accounts you could make a pile of money. Also, if anyone didn’t like the rate of return they were getting they would simply cash in and invest elsewhere.

“Pierre, how much did you invest with these guys?” I shouldn’t have been supping my beer when he replied because I gulped and it went down the wrong way.

“Four million.” “Christ!” was the next contribution from Mike. “And, let’s say, three and a half per cent of four million is . . .”

“A hundred and forty thousand pounds. But it’s not the money. I’ve got so much I don’t know what to do with it. I could easily just take it away and invest it elsewhere. It’s the principle. I don’t like being screwed and, if he is doing the same to a bunch of people who really need their money looked after, then I want to expose him. I’ve got the time to spend and not much else to do.”

I’ve always been disgusted by the thought that there are people who are prepared to stoop to this kind of clearly criminal behaviour. If it was true I could only agree a hundred per cent with Pierre’s reaction. I had railed about the financial services industry often enough – like most of the population of the country – but to be, perhaps, close to an actual case put things in a different light.

“If what you say is true, then I fully agree that something should be done about it. I don’t have a lot to do either and it could be quite fun.”

“Quite fun” is an expression I wish I hadn’t used. It was going to be more than that.

We all chewed this over for a minute or two. Mike got up to renew the drinks. I looked at Pierre with a grin, already trying to imagine how we could go about finding out if his suspicions were true or not.

“So what do you have in mind?” “Well, you’re practically local to Edinburgh. I wondered if you might have some contacts. Also with your financial expertise perhaps you can think of a way of finding out if they are up to anything or not. The reason I came over now is that there is a conference in Edinburgh next week on private investment and the AIM boss – a man called Alan Purdy – is to be the main speaker. I’m going to it to hear what he has to say and I wondered if you might come along too.”

By this time Mike had come back and set the drinks down with a grin.

“I rather like the idea of this,” he said “I know bugger all about finance and money but if these guys are crooks I’m all for bringing it out. Mind you, I don’t know what I can bring to the party.”