by Ian Hamilton
( 13 )
She started with the Hallmark Consulting file. The first pages of the file were boilerplate copies of the company’s registration and incorporation. There was nothing surprising. Tsai Men owned 70 percent of the shares and was legal representative and treasurer. Wu Bo held the balance of the shares and was-vice president and secretary. They both used the company address as their own.
Immediately following the incorporation documents were monthly bank statements. Lanfen had grouped them by year, starting with the most recent. Ava looked at the bottom stack and saw that the documents went back three years. Attached to each month’s statement was a thick wad of copies of cheques, and all the incoming and outgoing wire transfers arranged by date. Ava began to work her way through the first statement and immediately felt almost overwhelmed by the level of activity in the account. She sat back and thought about how to structure the information she had in front of her so it would be easier to understand. Then she reached for her notebook.
On a clean page she began to record the names of the companies that had made deposits, how often they’d made them, and the banks from which they’d originated. On another, she wrote down the names of companies and individuals who’d been sent money, how often they received it, and their banks. In both cases, she didn’t focus on the amounts so much as the frequency. She would go back later and highlight any particularly large sums of money. Her immediate objective was to identify all the players.
As she worked through the file, the first page soon filled with names, and she moved to a second. When she finished recording Hallmark Consulting’s latest year of activity, she had a list of eighteen companies, and she still had two years to go. The files for both Evergreen and Gold Star also went back three years and looked every bit as imposing.
The list of recipients of funds from Hallmark’s account was thankfully much smaller. Tsai Men and Wu Bo were withdrawing the equivalent of about US$50,000 a month for themselves, but the bulk of the money was being sent on to Gold Star and two other companies: Shell Investments and Mother of Pearl Investments. Shell’s money was sent to a different bank in Nanjing, and Mother of Pearl’s to one in Shanghai. Ava had never heard of either of them. She riffled through the statements again and looked at the total of the monthly deposits and the outflow. Most months more than a million dollars was being deposited into the account and about $900,000 was being transferred out.
This is one hell of a business, she thought.
She checked the time. It had taken well over an hour just to work through one year of statements from Hallmark in the most cursory manner. She knew there was no way she would be able to finish the rest and assess the information in a meaningful and professional way all in one day. What was most logical was to start organizing the information in piles by company, but the table she was working at had barely room for the single stack of files.
As she waited for Feng and the others to come back from lunch, she leafed quickly through the Evergreen statements. The company had some of the same depositors and several new ones. The account wasn’t quite as active as Hallmark’s, but it was still raking in about $700,000 a month and most of that money was sent along to Gold Star, Shell, and Mother of Pearl. Ava looked at the Gold Star file on the table and sensed without even opening it that it was going to be more important than Evergreen or Hallmark. She went to pick it up and then stopped when she heard a gentle knock at the door.
“Come in,” Ava called.
Feng led the two others into the room.
“Please sit,” Ava said.
Feng sat at the table across from Ava. Lanfen and Zheng sat together on a brown leather sofa. Lanfen’s knees were pressed tightly together and her hands were clasped in her lap.
“This is excellent information. You can give her the money,” Ava said to Feng.
He reached into the right breast pocket of his blazer and took out a thick envelope; then he took another one out of the left breast pocket. He raised an eyebrow in Lanfen’s direction, and she got up and walked to him with a smile tugging at the corners of her mouth.
“But don’t leave,” Ava said as Lanfen took the envelopes.
Lanfen settled back onto the couch, looking uncertain. Ava turned so she could face her directly. “Wu Bo is an officer in Hallmark Consulting. Do you know if he’s related to Mr. Tsai?” Ava said.
“He’s his cousin,” Lanfen said.
“You sound sure about that.”
“Mr. Wu told me. He’s the one from the company who is always in and out of the bank. I’ve gotten to know him quite well. His mother is the Governor’s sister.”
“She’s still alive?”
“So he says.”
“Do you know her name?”
“Wu Wai Wai.”
“Thanks for that information,” Ava said. “Now, I may need you to do more work for us. Are you agreeable?”
“What kind of work?”
“I see that some of the other companies listed on the statements bank with you. If I need information on them, will you provide it? We’ll pay, of course.”
“I can do that.”
“I’ll leave it up to Zheng and my associate here to work out the numbers with you.”
“That’s fine.”
“And your files go back only three years. If I need to go back further is that a problem?”
“No.”
“Good. That’s the easy part,” Ava said. “Now, as I was going through the statements I saw the names of banks I’ve never heard of. Through Zheng, we’ll provide you with a list. All I need to know is whether or not you have contacts at any of them who could provide the same service as you. We’d pay them well, and of course we’d pay you a healthy finder’s fee.”
“I would be happy to, but I have to tell you that I don’t have many contacts in other banks who I would trust.”
“As strange as it seems, that answer really pleases me,” Ava said and then stood. “Thanks for all you’ve done thus far. Hopefully your work will continue to be as good.”
Before Zheng or Lanfen could speak, Feng rose to his feet. “I’d like to add my thanks, and unless Ms. Kwong has anything else to say, I think you both can leave.”
“They can go,” Ava said.
When the door closed behind them, Feng said, “Was the information that good?”
“We won’t know until we finish going through it, but there’s lots of it, and from what I’ve seen it’s more than we could have expected.”
“What does it tell you?”
“The Tsai family has brought a great many people into a very large tent.”
“And?”
“We need to find out who they are, what they paid to get inside, and what they expect to receive in return.”
( 14 )
Feng carried the files down to the car. Ava could see he was eager to talk about what she had found, but she waited until they were back on the highway before she spoke.
“I could use some help with those,” she said, pointing at the files sitting on the back seat of the Toyota.
“What do you need?”
“All I went through was one year in the Hallmark file. Eighteen companies put money into their account, and there’s still two more years to review. I’m making a list of everyone who gave Hallmark money, how much, and their banks. Then I’m recording how much money left the account and where it went. I’d like the same thing done with the Evergreen Trading statements and I’d like it done right away. Do you want to take it on?”
“I can do that. How about Gold Star?”
“I’ll handle that one myself. It isn’t as thick,” she said. “When we’re finished, we should cross-reference the information from all three files and put it on a spreadsheet.”
“I have a couple of young accountants in the office who could do that. I don’t think it would be a challenge
for either of them,” he said, and paused. “And they both know how to keep their mouths shut.”
“Would they be available tomorrow morning if we finish our work by tonight?”
“I’ll make sure they will be.”
“Then let’s plan on getting everything done by tonight.”
Feng nodded and turned his attention back to the road. After a while he said, “I’m thinking about all those companies that put money into the Hallmark account. What kind of businesses are we talking about?”
Ava’s bag was at her feet. She reached down and took out her notebook. “Let me see,” she said. “I recognized the names of some hotel chains and a restaurant chain, and there are a lot of companies obviously involved in real estate. There are a bunch of factories, including yours, I imagine. I counted three banks and at least two financial services companies.”
“All making monthly payments?”
“No, some of them were one-time transfers, but they were substantial.”
“I’m sure all very well supported by invoices.”
“And probably contracts.”
“They are careful. I suspect it’s going to be very hard, if not impossible, to link Tsai Lian to any of those transactions.”
“That could be true.”
“And if we can’t, then there’s no leverage.”
“Don’t jump to conclusions,” Ava said. “We have files to go through, companies and transactions to identify, and then we may have to chase down more details. Who knows what we’ll find? In my old job, my approach was to go from A to B and then B to C. I didn’t believe in shortcuts and I wasn’t a good enough fortune teller to forecast the future. I let the information I uncovered dictate my next step.”
“Xu said you hunted down thieves and con men.”
“I was in the business of finding and reclaiming money that had been stolen. The people who had taken it represented a wide spectrum.”
“What kinds of sums were involved?”
“We — you know I partnered with Uncle, right?”
“I know.”
“Well, we rarely went after anything less than two or three million, and one job went as high as eighty million.”
“How often did you succeed?”
“Most often. We wouldn’t have stayed in business as long as we did, or attracted the quality of clients we had, if that hadn’t been the case.”
“But all of your cases involved money that had been stolen?”
“They did.”
“So far there’s no indication that the Tsai family has stolen anything.”
“There you go again, jumping to conclusions,” Ava said with a smile.
Feng pulled up in the driveway of the Peninsula. Ava got out and opened the back door to retrieve the files. Feng joined her. She took the Evergreen files from the stack and passed them to him.
“Call me when you’re finished,” she said. “We can compare notes and then decide what we’ll do next. But for sure, have your staff on standby.”
“I’ll organize that this afternoon.”
“And Feng, how many banks do you do business with?”
“Three directly, and then probably another three or four indirectly, through some of our companies.”
“The ones that you deal with indirectly, are they local or national or international?”
“Local.”
“How many law firms do you retain?”
“There’s one principal one in Shanghai, and then some of our companies have their own.”
“All local firms?”
“Yes.”
“Thanks,” Ava said, putting the Hallmark and Gold Star files under her arm. “I’ll talk to you tonight.”
As she walked through the hotel lobby, she thought fleetingly about stopping to have lunch, but the files had a stronger grip on her. She was reminded again how much she enjoyed the hunt.
She glanced at the hotel phone when she entered the suite and was pleased when she saw no flashing red light. Her computer on the desk was closed, and she intended to leave it that way. Her cellphone hadn’t rung all morning, and now she took it out of her bag and turned it off. She tossed the files onto the king-size bed.
By five o’clock, she was sitting in the desk chair by the side of the bed with her notebook in front of her. On the bed were more than thirty separate stacks of paper — some with only one sheet and several with substantially more. She had gone through both of the remaining years for Hallmark Consulting and found similar transaction records as in the first. The numbers were also consistent in magnitude from month to month and year to year. Over the last three years, Ava calculated that just over $36 million had gone into Hallmark from a wide range of companies. The funds had just as quickly left the account, in the form of monthly withdrawals by Tsai Men and Wu Bo and wire transfers made in almost equal amounts to Gold Star, Shell, and Mother of Pearl Investments.
Now she turned to the Gold Star file. She held it in her hand for a few seconds before opening it. It was thinner than Hallmark’s, but she knew that weight meant nothing when it came to the importance of the contents. She felt a keen stab of anticipation as she opened it. An hour later, she picked up the notebook and reworked the chart she’d started the day before.
Then she circled the names Hallmark and Gold Star and wrote the word conduit next to them. She was sure she’d be doing the same when Feng gave her his summary of the Evergreen Trading File.
She turned back to the Gold Star file and her notes on its deposits and outflow. Over the past three years the company had received more than $80 million from Hallmark and Evergreen and directly from other companies, and just like Hallmark, it had emptied its bank account every month. The recipients were the now-familiar names of Shell Investments and Mother of Pearl Investments, but there were two new names: AKG Consulting and New Age Capital. The transfers to New Age totalled more than $40 million and were disproportionately and glaringly large.
In addition to adding two new companies to her chart, Ava also noted two new Jiangsu-based banks she had never heard of. New Age used one in Nantong; AKG used the Nanjing Founders’ Bank. If the Tsai family wasn’t deliberately trying to obfuscate the sources and the eventual homes of its money, Ava thought, as she looked at the growing list of companies and banks, they were accidentally doing one hell of a great job.
She rolled the chair to the desk and entered, in rapid succession, the names of each of the companies into a search engine on her computer. The result was identical each time. There wasn’t a single mention of any of them. Maybe it was standard for private investment companies in China to keep a very low profile, Ava thought, but consulting companies?
She sat back in the chair, not knowing whether she should be pleased or frustrated by the day’s work. They may have peeled away some layers, but she couldn’t help but feel that she was even farther away from understanding what the Tsais were doing. She reached for her cellphone to call May, and then realized that she might not be back in Wuhan yet. Instead she sent a text: Call me when you get in.
She looked towards the window and realized it would be dark soon. Her stomach growled. She had been so absorbed in the Tsai files that she hadn’t even thought about eating. Now hunger attacked. She thought about going to Sir Elly’s or Yi Long Court but didn’t relish sitting by herself in a restaurant. She reached for the room service menu.
Half an hour later she was eating jellyfish soaked in vinegar. When that appetizer was finished, her chopsticks flitted between pan-fried marbled beef and giant mushrooms in oyster sauce and Yangzhou-style fried rice with shrimp. She sipped a white Burgundy as she ate, but she drank almost absent-mindedly as her mind jumped from the Tsai family to Maria.
When she had emptied both plates, she pushed the serving trolley to the door and sat at the desk. Then she phoned Feng.
“How’s it going
?” she asked when he answered.
“I’ve just finished.”
“And?”
“For the past three years an amount between four hundred thousand and nine hundred thousand has been deposited into the Evergreen account every month. Nearly all of it was just as quickly transferred to Gold Star, Shell, and Mother of Pearl Investments.”
“How many companies contributed?”
“Twenty-three.”
“How many did you recognize?”
“A lot of them are manufacturers. It seems they’re paying in the same manner as us and probably for the same kind of services.”
“Any oddities?”
“Not really, though I was surprised to see so many hotel chains.”
“Any huge payments?”
“A couple close to half a million, both from real estate companies, that look like one-of-a-kind commissions tied to land acquisition. I’m sure that when the land is developed, those could turn into monthly fees,” Feng said. “What did you come up with?”
“My results from the rest of the Hallmark files were similar to the first and like your Evergreen files. Lots of regular contributors and nearly all of the deposits sent on to Shell, Mother of Pearl, and Gold Star.”
“How about the Gold Star statements?”
“They were more interesting,” Ava said. “As well as getting money from Hallmark and Evergreen, the company was receiving payments from contributors like you. It added up to about eighty million over three years.”
“What did they do with the money?”
“It was sent to Shell, Mother of Pearl, and two other players — New Age Capital and AKG Consulting.”
“It seems that someone has gone to a lot of trouble to make it hard to track that money.”
“Yes, it does. I think Gold Star is just a conduit. Now we need to find out if those other so-called investment companies are as well.”
“I’ve never heard of any of them.”
“And I went online and had a quick look and came up absolutely empty.”
“They should be registered somewhere.”