Insider ви-6

by Julia Latynina

  Bemish met the Federation of Nineteen envoy, an elderly Malaysian, and the envoy led Bemish into a corner immediately and started telling him true stories from local officials' lives.

  There were about dozen envoys present. Bemish was suddenly surprised by the number. He thought that only fifteen… not even fifteen — ten years ago — the envoys' number would be way smaller. The Earth colonies were leaving the Federation of Nineteen one after another, peacefully or with swords drawn.

  Bemish was also introduced to the Gera envoy. The envoy was talking to two people that looked familiar to Bemish.

  "Mr. Lawrence Edwards," the envoy introduced one of them.

  "Mr. Jonathan Rusby," he introduced the other one.

  Bemish didn't bat an eyelid.

  Half the Galaxy police have been looking for Mr. Lawrence Edwards. Mr. Edwards had owned one of the Galaxy's largest and most respectable businesses. An airport technician's son, he made a five billion dinar fortune by the age of thirty. He used land allotments he acquired for construction purposes, as collateral to obtain the bank loans, and the banks trusted him completely. Unfortunately, Mr. Edwards had more and more difficulties in the last several years and he created a network of companies buying these land allotments from each other and using them later as collateral for bank loans. At the fifth act's end, Edwards escaped. When disappointed banks arrested the land allotments and unfinished skyscrapers, they found out their real price was very different from the price paid by the affiliated companies, and it didn't even cover one twentieth of Mr. Edwards loans.

  As for Mr. Rusby, he had also been a financial legend and the manager of a successful offshore fund investing citizens' savings in risk free government securities. Unfortunately, the interest promised by Mr. Rusby exceeded the possible government securities trading profits by 3 % and, henceforth, Mr. Rusby, while promising the complete safety, invested his clients' money using much more profitable but much less secure financial instruments. The clients, lured by high risk free profits, crowded at his office, the modest retirees and dishwashers who would have never invested in his fund if they had known the fund's structure, brought their money to him. Rusby, with his incredible nose for trading, often gleaned up huge pickings buying a bankrupted company's shares at 5 % of the face value that would later rise to 90 % and he had a great time meanwhile with the margin between his take-in and his payments to the clients.

  It was not economical but rather political quandaries that destroyed him — a new tax law on Aegeia, where his head office was, and a couple of the adroit auditors. Rusby's assets were arrested, his wife divorced him scandalously, the fund immediately bankrupted and Rusby escaped to Gera, where he kept insisting that, all this time, he fulfilled his obligations towards the clients and paid them exactly as he promised.

  By the way, the federal committee didn't argue that.

  It just claimed that if the Rusby investments' real risk level had been known, he would have had to pay the investors five-fold.

  "Eh, Mr. Bemish," Rusby said with a friendly smile, "I heard that you were also taking part in the Assalah auction?"

  "Also?" Bemish winced. "Wow! Would Shavash really let this man, wanted by the Galaxy police, participate in an auction."

  Next to a lighted pond with gold fish, a small man stood — Shavash.

  "Thanks for the headman," Bemish said, "what salary should I pay him?"

  "Nothing — he is your slave."

  Bemish choked.

  "I thought there is no slavery on Weia.

  "Call it the way you want. This man owes me two hundred thousand isheviks and he signed a contract that he would work this debt off any way I choose. I will transfer the contract to you and send it tomorrow with the courier."

  Bemish was silent.

  "By the way," Shavash asked suddenly, "they say, all the Assalah documentation was transferred to you. What's your opinion?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "I meant just what I said. You just familiarized yourself with the most detailed documentation, you are a financier. What do you say?"

  Bemish hesitated.

  I'd say that I realized how they make money on Weia. They make money not on private profits but on state expenses. They fed off Assalah in two ways. The first way was the inflated contracts and the second way was the written-off equipment. For instance, the company Alarcon was in charge of the land works. The same man was both the Assalah director and the Alarcon founder. He owned 20 % of the shares. There is the geological study's conclusion, that Assalah stands on an excellent basalt foundation with a forest situated above it. There are, also, seven million isheviks paid to Alarcon for draining swamps that have never existed. There is construction equipment paid for with the budget money at triple fold prices. And the same equipment was sold to Alarcon in two weeks and 97 % of the resource was claimed to be exhausted. How can you exhaust 97 % of the resource of a step excavator in ten working days? I bet, it was still standing unpacked at a warehouse, new and shiny! Any action was a financial pump that pumped state budget money from the company a manager was in charge of, to the company the manager owned.

  Shavash listened to the Earthman with eyes half closed.

  "You said that the director owned 20 % of the Alarcon shares. Who owned the other 80 %?"

  "I assume that you owned it, Shavash."

  A deferential waiter stopped next to them and Shavash took a crystal glass on a thin stem from the silver tray.

  "However, I didn't understand certain things," Bemish continued, "what is an "ishevik bill of credit"?"

  Shavash spread his hands.

  "We were forced to do this. When the ministry doesn't have money, it has sometimes to issue short-term bills of credit maturing in three months. You need to pay the contractors somehow."

  "In other words, you, Mr. Shavash, issue your own money."

  "Not exactly," the vice-ministry pointed out indifferently, "Money costs as much as it costs. While, when you obtain "ishevik bills of credit", you go to a bank to exchange them for money. The bank can pay you thirty percent of the face value or it can pay you hundred percent. It depends on how good friends you, I and bank are."

  "I believe," Bemish enquired, "it's meaningless to ask you if you approve of cutting the ineffective industry subsidies down."

  "Theoretically speaking, I approve of it," Shavash said tiredly. "You don't read local media. I am an enthusiastic supporter of the budget deficit curbing. This Assalah thing swallowed two billion isheviks while the real expenses were not even two million."

  The official's voice didn't carry either cynicism or sarcasm in it. Bemish kept silent — he didn't know how to snub a man who issued pseudo money as the first finance vice-minister, received it on the Assalah's account as a Board of Director's member, and ferried it to his personal account as real money.

  Right then, Bemish realized a very simple thing — Kissur can bequest a villa to him, Kissur can secure Assalah for him — but only Shavash has the life and death power over money in this country.

  "Who was the man who visited the manor with Ashidan?" Shavash asked suddenly. "Did you recognize him?"

  "No," Bemish came to his senses.

  Shavash silently opened the folder he had with him and extracted a newspaper article. The article showed the late Ashidan's companion and the title announced, "The main suspect in the Menszel trading exchange center escapes in an unknown direction."

  Bemish hadn't heard about the explosion and he leafed through the text quickly. The explosion was indeed a small one — two or three doors cracked and a computer had its brains blown out. The blast was small because only one explosive device performed — a non-fragmentation demolition shell with ten grams of trinex. A case with the equivalent of three kilograms of dynamite was next to it but, miraculously, it didn't detonated. If the case had exploded, the victim count would have been in tens or, even hundreds.

  "They left the villa," Bemish said, "the same day."

  "Ashidan has nasty
companions, " Shavash said. "Though this guy is a friend of Kissur's."

  "Pardon my curiosity, Mr. Shavash — it's surprising how you know everything. You know even what happens at a villa two hundred kilometers away from the capital. Are you a vice-minister of finance or of police?"

  "I am simply a rich man," the small official said. "And a rich man is not the man who owns a personal villa or a personal spaceship. It is a man who owns a personal jail."

  "A personal jail? Is that a joke?"

  Shavash smiled.

  "Would you like to see it? I can organize a trip."

  "One way?"

  "Never joke about jail, Mr. Bemish," calmly and coldly the Empire official said. They were silent for a moment and, then, Bemish said,

  "How much is IC going to pay for the stocks? I can pay more?"

  "It doesn't matter, Terence, whether you pay more or less for the stocks," Shavash grinned. "Imagine, that you pay for the stocks more but your application is not set up correctly."

  "How much does a correct application cost?"

  In the uneven light by the lamps outside the window, the small official's raised eyebrows were easy to see.

  "Come on," Shavash smiled.

  "Listen," Bemish said quietly and clearly, "a fantastic sum given to you by IC was mentioned to me. I don't know whether or not it's true. I am not going to offer you this kind of money. If, however, I buy the company and you buy the stock options, in three years, your shares will be worth eighteen times more than any of IC's pitches."

  Shavash only smiled.

  "You know perfectly well what IC is, Shavash. And you know that it will bankrupt Assalah, and you know why it will do it."

  Shavash had a perfect composure but Bemish noticed surprise or, even, horror passing in his eyes.

  Here, the Gera envoy with another man entered the hall and Bemish bowed and walked away to the balcony.

  Giles sat at a corner table on the balcony. A glass of palm vodka, mixed with mango juice, stood next to him and an open magazine, that Giles was probably reading, was under the glass.

  "Good day, Mr. Bemish! They say that you already own half the Assalah with a cute villa on top?"

  Giles was drunk. He lamented probably that half the Assalah didn't belong to him.

  "I haven't asked for this gift," Bemish said, "and, anyway, I found myself in an idiotic position."

  "Especially, since you are not going to buy the company anyway, are you?"

  Bemish was tempted to empty the glass of vodka in the Giles face.

  "Let me introduce you to our executive director," Giles said lazily, "James McFergson."

  Bemish turned around — behind him, a stout short man with unusually lively eyes and a mole on a pug nose was smiling and extending amicably his hand.

  "Overjoyed to meet you," MacFergson declared, shaking Bemish's hand. It really looked, as if he was overjoyed to meet Bemish, and, as if no Bemish existed in this world, he would fall dead with sorrow.

  Here, the stage in the garden under the balcony was lightened, the harmonious sounds of flutes and lute-shells poured forth and a performance started below — in not too prudish dresses, four beauties were dancing a complex dance with swords. Quite a crowd surrounded the stage quickly and, when the performance finished, a guest — likely drunk- climbed the boards to kiss the dancing girls.

  "Who is this bloke?" Bemish enquired.

  "The Adana envoy, " McFergson answered. "The envoy fits the country."

  "An Earthman?" Bemish said with surprise.

  "They are no longer Earthmen," McFergson smirked, "the planet Adana, for your information, was settled by SD Warheim. So, Warheim brought there several dozen thousand unemployed people — subsidizing their one-way tickets. In just a short while, the unemployed realized that there were a lot of jobs on Adana and no unemployment benefits. So, they all screamed that it was slavery in disguise and demanded that the company transport them back to Earth. When the company offered the opportunity to earn money for the transportation fees on their own, they called it Earth imperialism and declared independence. However, I heard that their current President makes them work way harder than the company did and in concentration camps rather than free."

  "Mr. Bemish knows that," Giles interrupted his colleague. "Just when the trouble started, he bought United Ferrous shares and sold them later at triple fold price when the new Adana government transferred all of Warheim's concessions to United."

  Several people from the group of Weian officials noiselessly approached the conversing Earthmen. Among them, Bemish noticed Jonathan Rusby with the smiling Gera envoy.

  "Mr. Bemish has also provided a great assistance to Andjey Gerst. In my opinion, your decision to create a Gera-oriented portfolio investment fund made many financiers pay attention to Gera economics."

  "What's so bad about it?" Bemish enquired irritably.

  "Gerst is a dictator."

  "And how exactly does it show?"

  "So far, it shows, " Giles said, "in him attracting high level scientists and advancing huge loans to local companies for the newest technologies development — our government is forced to spend this money on social expenses. And Gera banks are reputed to be the most reliable in the Galaxy, though not due to the government protection but rather due to the very strict laws specifying the total personal responsibility of the management."

  "Whose nails do they pull out?"

  "Nobody's."

  "And where is the dictatorship?

  "Eh," Giles said, "in your opinion, a dictatorship is when they pull the people's nails out and talk stupidly… Only a weak dictatorship pulls the people's nails out, it's not a dangerous dictatorship, it will expire of its own accord, it's doomed because when they pull the people's nails out, the people don't work as much and the less they work, the more nails they have to pull out."

  "Do I understand you correctly," Bemish inquired, "that any state, where they don't pull your nails out, is a strong dictatorship? I think you just envy that Gera is better off than your own eh…?"

  "Australia," Giles said, "I am an Australian. I understand you, though. You have better opinion of Gera than of your own country because Gera's Dow index grows faster."

  He stood up.

  "It's a stupid argument," he said, "I've been to Gera and I could give you hundred proofs that its Leader is thousand times more dangerous than all the psychopaths… Why don't you think about this — the Gera army's total military capabilities are approaching those of Earth and all the other Federation of Nineteen members' armies combined, and every time, when somebody in the Federation Assembly proposes to boost the defense spending, the owners of the accounts in the stable Gera banks start screaming that we should not spend money on war, we should spend the money on social assistance."

  Kissur came in after midnight — by his looks, he spent the evening in a more interesting way — in a pub. He ran into Bemish on a garden path, next to a grotto that, due to an evident reason, Bemish needed to visit in private.

  Kissur slapped Bemish on the shoulder and noted.

  "I haven't expected to meet you at this zoo! So, trader, haven't you yet changed your mind about buying Assalah?"

  "I will buy Assalah," Bemish said, "no matter what. At least, so that Giles wouldn't get it."

  "What's the difference between Giles or you buying it?" Bemish was silent for a moment. Kissur was clearly drunk and Bemish wasn't a picture of sobriety either.

  "The difference? I guess, I will explain to you, Kissur, what Giles is doing. Giles represents a company that nobody knows anything about. He says that a private financier stays hidden behind the IC initials and he is ready to invest ten billion in this business. That's bullshit. There are no such investors."

  "Why is he doing that?"

  This is chicanery. Whoever is behind Giles gets Assalah and issues the new shares. Your planet desperately lacks the space infrastructure, it's generally a state property, and private spaceport investments should be fantastically
profitable. The stocks prices rise through the ceiling, IC makes billions on the price differential and gets out. Shavash gets millions, IC gets billions and the Federation investors with the Empire nationals get a fly speck. I spent this week making enquires about IC. It is a phantom. This is a trickster company that had a couple of projects on some planets that nobody has heard anything about, — and these planets had been expelled from the United Nations. A planet that's not a UN member — from a financial viewpoint — Kissur, is a planet where the public companies' accounting doesn't have to follow the Federal financial committee standards. They have a well developed system — they bribe an official, issue the stocks, advertising their "connections to the government", peddle these stocks to fools through a phony company, the stocks grow, the company cleans the cream off, and then — kabloom! Got it?

  "Got it," Kissur said. "I got it, that our companies have a merry choice — they can choose between a disreputable greenmailer and a company like IC."

  Kissur left soon, having loud-mouthed the Federation envoy and publicly promised some official to set the dogs at him, "If you, bastard, demonstrate your disdain to the sovereign again by parking your ill-gotten with bribes Rolls-Royce next to the Nut Pavilion."

  He did, however, invite Bemish for a dinner at Red Dog restaurant the day after tomorrow.

  X X X

  The next day, Bemish returned to the city and went, first thing, to DJ securities. The flower pot with summer hyacinths, right in front of the office entrance, was bent in by bulky jeep tires and people bustled through the wide open office doors like ants in a smashed anthill.

  "What's going on?" Bemish inquired from Krasnov coming out to meet him.

  "Tax police visited us," Krasnov said. "They locked up all the paperwork."

  "What laws did you break?"

  "You should better ask what laws we didn't break! What laws can you avoid breaking in a country where the regulations are made not with the goal of paying the taxes to the state but with the goal of paying the hush money to the tax collectors!"

  "Haven't you tamed the tax collectors?"

  "We? Come on, Bemish, every month… They apologized — we wouldn't do it but we were ordered to…"