Whistle Blower (6 page)

TRUCK DRIVER MITCHELL'S job was a collection from Freetown Airport freight area and another delivery to Rocki General Supplies in Sani Abacha Street for the attention of Mr. Moses. "It is two hundred boxes," said Mitchell's boss, Mr. Suleiman, at Mambolo Transport Enterprises as Mitchell was leaving.

"But I can only fit one hundred and forty boxes in the truck and ten on the front seat," said Mitchell. It was only three weeks since his long and troubled drive to Sulima and Mitchell was concerned he might need to go again.

"No problem. You take one hundred this morning and one hundred this afternoon. Anyway, maybe these boxes are smaller."

"But if Mr. Moses wants them taken to Sulima I will be gone for four days, maybe eight days," said Mitchell. "We need a bigger truck."

"No problem," said Mr. Suleiman. "Just deliver the two hundred boxes to Rocki General Supplies. Let us see what Mr. Moses wants."

"I don't like Mr. Moses," said Mitchell, "and he doesn't like me."

"That's because he's a fraudster, a crook and a skimmer, Mitchell. All skimmers are like that. They don't like people. They only like money and they always want more. Now, go. Do not be late. And here is the money to give to the customs man if he is difficult today. We will add it to Mr. Moses' invoice."

The hassle at the airport freight terminal was never as bad as the sea port and Mitchell's papers were all in order. Two hundred boxes of water purifiers it said on the documents. The supplier, a company called Ecoteck from Bologna, the manufacturer, Guangdon Trading, China, and the buyer—Rocki General Supplies, Freetown Sierra Leone. It looked straightforward and the boxes were, indeed, much smaller than the last consignment. Mitchell loaded them into his truck by taking them one by one off the pallets they had arrived on and saw that every box had the same blue letters on the sides just as the last delivery he had made to Rocki General Supplies.

But working alone in the humid early morning heat Mitchell was now sweating heavily. He was ready to go but water was what he needed first and there was a plastic bottle on his driver's seat. It was just as he drained the last drops from the bottle that he heard someone shouting. "Stop, stop." Granville, the warehouse manager was running towards him.

Mitchell jumped down, threw his empty bottle onto his seat. "Yessah?"

Granville came up, panting. "Big mistake… they give you wrong pallets. These boxes are for not for you. You must unload them. These boxes are still waiting for collection by someone else. Your boxes are still inside the warehouse. They arrived last night Swissair from Italy. Big mistake. I already slap Tamba. Very careless. Too much girlfriend. He still drunk from last night I think. Too much poyo. I slap him hard."

"OK," said Mitchell. "So you want me to unload my truck again?"

"Yes, we will bring the right pallets out here for you on the forklift truck. Please start now."

"OK," said Mitchell and started to unload the two hundred boxes once more and re-stack them on the empty pallets. Halfway through, the forklift truck appeared, made four visits and dropped another four full pallets alongside Mitchell's truck. Mitchell looked at them, covered in clear plastic film. "My boss, Mr. Suleiman, must buy a bigger truck, I think," he said to the forklift driver. "One for loading pallets. Mambola Transport business is growing too fast."

"These boxes are very light," said the forklift truck driver. "It is easy for you. You should not complain so much. Just do your job."

"Yessah," said Mitchell, wondering if the forklift driver was Tamba, the one who had already been slapped at least once. But, indeed, the new boxes did feel much lighter. Mitchell was able to carry three at a time instead of one at a time and within half an hour he had re-loaded the truck. Then he went to look for Granville to make sure everything was now in order. He found him in his office drinking ginger beer and eating benny cake.

"I have reloaded the new boxes," he said, wondering if he might be invited to partake of a drop of ginger beer. "Is the paperwork OK?"

"Yes," said Granville with his mouth full. "No problem, it was the wrong boxes but not the wrong paperwork."

"I'll be going, then," said Mitchell, lingering just a fraction, his mouth as dry as the dust lying on Granville's desk.

"Ok, no problem," said Granville and took another bite of benny cake.

This time, Mitchell drove his truck slowly and carefully along Sani Abacha Street, knowing full well how upset other traders became if their businesses were interrupted. This time, also, he reversed the truck up to the metal doors of Rocki General Supplies without trouble and knocked twice on the metal door. Then he knocked harder. At last the little door inside the bigger door creaked opened and Mr. Moses appeared. Mitchell felt a waft of cool, air-conditioned air on his face and feet. "You are late," Mr. Moses said, looking up at Mitchell's truck with a 'McDonnell's—the Queen of Whiskey' sign printed on the new tarpaulin.

"Yes, sir, sorry Mr. Moses. There was a problem at the airport. They gave me the wrong boxes."

"Ffff…ahh," said Mr. Moses. "I will open the main doors. Bring them inside. There should be two hundred and fifteen boxes."

"Ah, no sir, two hundred boxes. It is two hundred. The papers show two hundred. I will show you."

Desperately hoping nothing else was wrong, Mitchell returned to his cab, retrieved the paperwork from the dashboard and showed it to Mr. Moses.

"Two hundred boxes, Mr. Moses. You see? From Italy. Swissair. And they have blue writing just like last time. It says UNICEF."

"OK, I will check everything when you have finished."

"Do they need to go to Sulima, Mr. Moses? Because, maybe I don't need to unload them but go direct to Sulima."

"They are not for Sulima."

"They will be staying in your warehouse, Mr. Moses? If not, can Mambola Transport help with anything more?"

"No."

It took Mitchell another hour to unload the two hundred boxes and stack them on the floor inside Mr. Moses' cramped and dusty warehouse. Occasionally he stood in the doorway with his shirt open to let the air-conditioned air pass inside but he never dawdled for long in case Mr. Moses saw him. Finally, he finished and went in search of Mr. Moses. He found him sitting inside the small, dark, inner office with a strip light on and the air-conditioning unit rattling. He knocked, Mr. Moses got up, opened the door and stood there, the cool air streaming from the inside like the meat cold store that Mitchell had once delivered to. "I have finished, Mr. Moses. Two hundred boxes with UNICEF printed on the outside. Please can you sign here."

"I will check first." Moses closed the door behind him but Mitchell had already seen a cramped office, a desk piled high with files and paper, filing cabinets and shelves, box files and a trash bin overflowing with more paper. He also saw a crate of unopened Coca Cola bottles and a fridge with more files stacked on top. But Mitchell followed Mr. Moses through the warehouse to the boxes he'd just stacked so neatly. 

"Open one."

Mitchell took a box down, took his truck keys from his pocket and used it to score along the brown tape seal. He pulled open the flaps and stood back.

"What is this? It is empty. Just newspapers. Open another."

Mitchell repeated the operation.

"It is nothing but old newspapers. Italian newspapers. What is going on? Where are the water purifiers?"

Mitchell, seeing the look on Mr. Moses' face backed away.

"What have you done?"

"Nothing, Mr. Moses. Maybe big mistake at the airport, but I only did what I was told."

As Mr. Moses checked another box, Mitchell ran from the warehouse, jumped into his truck, started the engine, drove off and hit an umbrella. But he didn't stop to apologize.

EVERY FEW WEEKS or so, Jim Smith would ride his motorcycle into Kanchanaburi, the provincial capital, and then catch an early morning bus to Bangkok. Sometimes he would stay for a night or two in a cheap hotel and use the time to replenish his stock of paper, paint and brushes. He would buy copies of English language newspapers and sometimes eat in an Italian restaurant to remind himself of European food. And he would sometimes sit in a roadside bar off of Sukhumvit Road, watch the passing nightlife, drink a beer or two and, if he felt people were looking at him too closely, hide behind the pages of the newspaper or move away.

It was on one of his first trips to stock up on paint materials that he had felt someone tap him on the shoulder. "James?"

The voice that accompanied the tap on his shoulder was somehow familiar but, nevertheless, it made him jump and prepare himself to deny everything. Jim's hair was longer than it had ever been. It was shoulder length and, together with a heavy sun tan, beard, grubby tee shirt, khaki shorts and sandals he was surprised that anyone recognized him. "James? Jim? Jim Smith?" Jim ducked further behind his paper but then turned to see who it was.

Standing, looking down at him was Colin Foreman, the Chairman of a business group, the Federation of European Small Enterprises, at whose annual conference Jim had spoken a year before. "Jim, I hardly recognize you. It is you, isn't it?"

What followed was a discussion that went on until the early hours of the next morning—a discussion with, perhaps, the only person that Jim could have hoped to have met by pure chance. By midnight a plan was already being hatched.

"I decided soon after arriving here that I would, somehow, find a way to prove what I had been saying," Jim told Colin as he began to relax in the unfamiliar company of a fellow Englishman. "But I'm not precisely sure what to do yet. I toyed with the idea of going back to the UK but frankly I'm worried that I'd be targeted all over again. And what would I now say to Margaret, my wife? Beg for forgiveness for something I've not done? Crawl back promising to give it all up and go bird watching and hill walking? I could not do that, Colin. I don't want to return home like a guilty dog with its tail between its legs and then abandon it all. I just can't do it.

"But I feel I'm living under a type of stigma—a stigma that goes with knowing you were once looked upon as highly successful but were then seen for what you really were—an incompetent failure. I can't live with that either. And I don't want to return home to be shunned or be the subject of yet more mocking cartoons about my failed marriage and my style that does not fit the image they expect. I believe in free speech but I honestly believe I will continue to be treated as an idealistic oddity hung up on matters which others find unimportant, irrelevant or downright untrue. So, as I don't want to go home just yet, I want to find a way of dealing with it from here."

"So you live here in Bangkok, Jim?"

"No," Jim said. "It's too noisy, too crowded, too cluttered and too easy for someone with connections and resources to track me down and deal with me in whatever way they decide."

"Is it that dangerous, Jim?"

"Oh yes," Jim replied and took a mouthful of the beer that lay on the table in front of him. Then he took a deep breath. "Yes, I do think it's that dangerous. I had begun to touch some very sensitive nerves although I think they thought I knew more than I did. But I left behind a big pile of unfinished business. It's not revenge, Colin. I'm above that. This is about proving I am right about the extent of corruption that exists. It's about showing how vindictive campaigns can be launched by people in power to stop someone from exposing the truth. It's about doing what is right despite the risk. But if I am to wage war on powerful individuals with no limits to their resources and no limits to the extent they'll go to silence someone, then I think it would be a lot safer waging it from somewhere other than London or Europe. But it's still unfinished business and I've never ever walked away from a job half done. I owe it to myself and to the many, like you, who believed there was something behind what I was saying.

"So I still feel I let them down by appearing to run away. But I had no choice and all I intended to do was to go abroad for a few days to think, to decide on a strategy. I had no idea I'd end up here where days have stretched to months, but I do not want to be associated with cowardice or with lacking a will to persevere. That, on top of the character they painted of me as an incompetent fool, is not one I can live with. So, yes, I will stay here until I find a way to continue what I started. Then I might return home."

"So you live here alone, Jim?"

"Yes," he replied.

They had moved from the noisy roadside bar to Colin's hotel on Sukhumvit Road and in the plush, air-conditioned lounge bar, Jim was shivering. "You feeling cold, Jim?"

"Yes," he admitted, "I suppose I've grown used to heat."

"So do you live without air-conditioning?"

"Yes."

"Good lord. It's been like a furnace here today. It's a house? An apartment?"

"A house."

"Here in Bangkok?"

"No."

"So where, Jim?"

"I'd rather not say, Colin. In fact it might be better for you if you don't know. It's remote because I appreciate countryside, peace, solitude and the satisfaction that comes from quiet contemplation—meditation if you prefer."

"You make it sound as if you've become a hermit, Jim—a monk. And what do you think about when you're…meditating?"

Jim looked up at the huge, glass chandelier that hung in the center of the hotel lobby. "I suppose I've become a sort of Buddhist—not of the temples, chanting, ringing bells, rituals and burning incense sort, but closer—at least I like to think so—to the original concept. I was very angry when I arrived. Living here alone has calmed me."

Jim leaned back, closed his eyes. "Revenge causes ‘angry minds’—that is how it is put in Buddhist writings," he said quietly. "There is a delightful saying by a monk called Shantideva who wrote: 'This enemy, this anger, has no function other than to cause me harm. There is no evil like anger and no virtue like patience.'

"I have become a more patient man, Colin. But patience itself takes many forms including the patience of not retaliating and the patience of voluntarily enduring suffering. Yes, I've done a bit of suffering here and it's not all been voluntary. All I want is a chance to prove I was right all along."

Colin had relaxed into the back of his chair. "Mmm. So what do you do with your time, other than…other than this meditating?"

"I paint. I came to Bangkok to buy more materials."

"And you're not bored, Jim? You used to be so busy, so dynamic."

"I am very, very busy," Jim said, defensively. "It is a continuation of how I always lived my life—by commitment and self-discipline. Other than that unfinished business, I am very content. I have no need of material things. I never did. Money is nothing. It never was. I made a lot but to me it was a measure of my success in business—a yardstick. I didn't really want it or need it. In fact I still find it difficult to spend money unless for food or things to do with work.

"I look, see something, decide I don't really need it and move on. Others seem to worship money and possessions. There is a gross unfairness in a society where those that already have money steal from the millions of their fellow beings who have actually created the wealth in the first place. Greed perpetrated by these people just because they have acquired the status or the means is true corruption. Though, perhaps, they are to be pitied for believing that money will buy them the happiness and contentment they crave. If so then they have failed to understand the transience of life and the finality of death and for that I blame our religious leaders. Perhaps, too, they are so ashamed of appearing unsuccessful that they use fraud and corruption as the solution. The only shame I felt was in being associated with incompetence, naivety and failure. That is now what drives me. I want to prove I was none of those things—that I was right all along.

"I am content with what I have but cannot forget what happened to me because it could happen to others and perhaps it already has. But it plays on my mind. I cannot forget Margaret. I cannot forget how the press treated her. I still remember the TV pictures of her when those photos of me were published. It was a lie, Colin. Someone with powerful connections was paying to circulate fictitious lies. It was a clever and complete character assassination deliberately designed to destroy me. Someone, somewhere had the money to pay for stories to be invented—deliberately. They wanted to destroy me and my marriage and if I had not gone away, if I had still persevered with my campaign and dug still more deeply into what I suspected was going on, then I just wonder how far they might have gone. I think they believed I knew far more than I'd made public."

"And do you know more that you made public?" Colin Foreman asked.

Across the coffee table from Colin, Jim leaned back into the soft comfort of the five star hotel's easy chair, wrapped his bare arms around himself and shivered again. "I have my suspicions, Colin. My suspicion is that it goes to the very top and is even more widespread than I suggested. And I also believe that it will become more and more difficult to detect and prove as time goes by as they use more sophisticated technology and become increasingly expert at using threats, bribery and blackmail to stifle any attempts to expose it."

Jim took a deep breath.

"I think there is a structure in place specifically aimed at hiving off huge amounts of international economic aid and humanitarian aid money. Governments and newspapers like to blame African despots and militant groups for stealing foreign aid money, building palaces, buying weapons and expensive cars, spreading extremism and living lives of five star luxury far removed from the poverty of the people they govern, or for whom the aid was intended. There is no doubt they do, but I think they should look more closely to home. It is also wrong that billions of Euros and Dollars of international aid money from hardworking taxpayers finds its way back to criminals, politicians and bureaucrats working in public bodies and operating in a way that benefits its protectors, not at all dissimilar to the mafia. It is a well-known fact that the greatest percentage of world wealth is now held by a tiny fraction of individuals. That is not right, but it is particularly wrong that the so-called hard working taxpayer is ripped off by politicians and the vast bureaucracy that they have deliberately created for their own protection."

"You really think it is as organized as that, Jim?" asked Colin.

"Yes," said Jim. "Because I myself was approached.

"Not so long ago I lost several big contracts to sell water purification equipment to West Africa. The purchases often depended on international aid money—all perfectly proper, legal and correct. But in all cases there was a last minute change to the tender specifying the equipment. We couldn't match it. In fact I didn't know anyone who could. But who gets given the contract? An unknown company. Did they deliver? No, suddenly they declare insolvency. What happened to the money? Disappeared. Did anyone check what went wrong? Yes, half-heartedly. Did I check? You bet. What did I find? The audit trail of the bid tampered with and, clearly, the company who got the business had not been properly checked out. Its trading history? Artificial. Its references? Forgeries. And who is in just the right position to interfere with due diligence and proper adjudication process? Bureaucrats. And who sits behind the bureaucrats? Politicians. You want me to go on?"

"Christ!" said Colin. He had been sitting well forward as Jim was speaking so quietly. "And who approached you?"

"Before I got elected and before I'd sold the business, someone with a Dutch accent phoned me. He didn't give his name but asked if I wanted to guarantee we got more business. Already smelling a rat I thought for a minute but then said yes. I was then invited to meet someone called Philippe in London—the Intercontinental Hotel, Park Lane no less. I asked who Philippe was. I was told that Philippe would explain at the meeting. So, I check this name out and, yes, there's a fellow called Philippe Eijsackers who was then head of the so-called pre-qualification team. Still smelling a rat, I wander along to Park Lane and stand around for thirty minutes. Then I get approached. Was he Philippe, I ask. No, says the man in the same Dutch accent as on the phone. Sorry, Philippe couldn't make it but would I come upstairs to a room he'd booked.

"Up we go. I find I'm talking to a guy who won't give his name but claims he can fix it for Smith Technology to get a share of the next few suitable aid bids that go in. I ask how. I get told not to ask too many questions, but as long as I put a thirty-three percent commission his way on signing the contract he'd sort it and much more as well. And so it goes on for thirty minutes. At the end I say I'll think about it and go back to my office. Next day, a DVD arrives in the mail—a nice quality recording of my conversation at the Intercontinental Hotel but with a slight crackling sound at the end and a Dutch voice saying thanks for agreeing to the commission arrangement. 

"Now does that sound to you like the start of some sort of blackmailing or an attempt to mess me and my business about, Colin?"

Colin shook his head. "And you've not told this to anyone?"

"No. You are the only one—so far. And where is that original DVD now? Who knows. But you can bet it was to be the next phase in their attack on me. I still have a copy. It's with a solicitor, but it wouldn't do me a lot of good in a court of law."