Sea of Gold

by Nick Elliott

  ‘This is your favourite trick pethi-mou and one of these days I will call your shot.’

  ‘My bluff. Call my bluff.’

  ‘Whatever. If you paid as much attention to your Greek as you do to correcting my English you might be able to handle those negotiations with your dear shipowners better.’

  ‘It’s another of my tricks,’ I confided. ‘Allowing them to show off their English to me gives them a false sense of superiority over the stupid foreigner. But really I’m the one at an advantage because I’ve led them into using a means of communicating in which they are not actually one hundred per cent competent.’

  ‘You come out with such vlakies ores ores, Angus, but if that’s what you want to use as an excuse for not studying our language seriously, then so be it.’

  ‘Right. So dinner at mine at nine then, and shall I get some gyro from the place down the road?’

  ‘No, Angus. I will cook for you as usual. And I will bring some of my mother’s melopita which you cannot resist.’

  ‘I don’t deserve you agapi-mou,’ I replied truthfully.

  ***

  Just as, however hard you try to ignore it, sooner or later you have to stop and remove the minutest stone from your shoe, so it was with these cases.

  Manish hadn’t reported back from Bangkok but the Sophia M had resumed her voyage to Lagos following a compromise agreement between the Club and cargo underwriters, which was good news. There’d be some damage to the rice no doubt, but I was content to negotiate any cargo claims as and when they came in, which wouldn’t be for weeks yet. Meanwhile, I had a mountain of other case work to plough through following my meetings in Leith and for the first few days I was back I was happy to focus on clearing the backlog.

  By Friday afternoon I had made good progress. The phone was quiet and Zoe had asked for the afternoon off so she could beat the weekend exodus and get down to her village in the Peloponnese. And Eleni was cooking so I didn’t have to worry about getting dinner organised.

  I’d been missing something but now it came to me. The Med Runner voyage charter had the word ‘outwith’ in its Laytime clause. If my suspicions were valid, that suggested that a charterparty fraud had been planned. But there was no charterparty fraud, only the cargo theft. Had it failed, or been aborted?

  I went next door to the store room and started rooting around. A couple of years back a cargo of white goods shipped from the Turkish port of Derince to Casablanca had vanished. Various theories had been put forward as to what might have caused this magical occurrence but upon investigation it transpired the washing machines, cookers and fridges had never been shipped in the first place. The consignee’s cargo underwriters had come after the owners of the Centurion 4, the alleged carrying vessel, which was entered with the CMM, for the value of the cargo that he was expecting to receive and had already paid for.

  It was a ghost ship fraud, with neither the owners nor the master of the Centurion 4 having any knowledge of the cargo they were supposed to have contracted to deliver. The ship had been in Derince all right, and on the date the cargo was said to have been shipped, but was actually loading steel products for Rouen at the time. Her identity had simply been misappropriated to substantiate the fraudulent transaction.

  It was not a particularly memorable case, but that peaceful Friday afternoon it was the stone in my shoe. I carted the files back to the office, poured myself a coffee and started wading through the case documents, starting with the voyage charterparty. And sure enough, there was that clause, and that word.

  So now, it seemed, I had myself two successful and one failed fraud case, all on voyage charter contracts and all with the same oddly worded Laytime clause. To add to this were the two cases Claire had referred to. It wasn’t just the wording of the clause itself though. It was the precision with which these scams had been executed. In my experience, most fraud cases were perpetrated at a local level by small-time conmen, quick and careless in effecting their misdeeds. What so often made them easy to solve, if not to prosecute, was the simple documentary errors made by criminals whose first language was rarely English and whose understanding of and adherence to the often arcane wording of legally binding documents such as bills of lading, charterparties and letters of credit, was far from perfect.

  Setting aside the comparatively unsophisticated cargo theft in the Med Runner case, these more recent cases showed flawless execution pointing more to a well-organised professional with an inside knowledge of how these transactions really worked.

  But tempting though it was to jump to conclusions, the evidence did not prove, by any stretch of the imagination, my theory of a single directing mind behind a series of frauds. Could I find anything else? Another less tenuous common denominator?

  First I needed to eliminate the possibility that this was just a standard wording favoured by brokers north of the Border, of whom there were still a few, or simply Scottish brokers wherever they were. I knew some, including Andrew Findlay who worked right here in Piraeus. I wasn’t keen to alert him of my suspicions so I said the Club was compiling a catalogue of charterparty clauses that deviated from the customary form, and had come across this one.

  ‘Never seen or heard it before,’ he said, sounding uninterested. ‘Don’t you have anything better to do with your time, Gus? Is this how they keep you busy these days?’ I ignored the barb and we agreed it had been a while and we should meet for a drink sometime.

  Then I called a young broker in Glasgow who had never seen the wording either and sent an email to another I knew in Hong Kong, whose reply when it arrived was also negative.

  Next I moved away from the charterparties and turned to the claim correspondence, thinking there might be something there to link the cases. There wasn’t, at least not that I could see. And maybe there would be nothing. If ‘they’ were that good, I might never find anything to link the cases other than the high standard of their execution and the odd wording in the Laytime clause.

  The Med Runner claim had amounted to a million and a half dollars, that being the value of the cargo delivered to Poti and then misappropriated. The yield from the freight less fifteen days’ charter hire on the Sophia M fraud was a similar amount, and the white goods never shipped but paid for in the Centurion 4 case was more – nearly two and a half million bucks. As cargo values went, these were not huge sums. But if, as I suspected, the frauds were being perpetrated by the same directing mind, and these three cases were the tip of an iceberg, then the scale of such an operation could be vast. The eight or nine billion tons of world trade carried by sea every year was valued at anywhere between ten and fifteen trillion dollars. A well-organised fraud operation picking off carefully selected targets could generate a very useful revenue stream. As a business model it had merit.

  The key, as with all frauds, would involve preying on the victim’s gullibility and greed. In these cases, the voyage charter terms – particularly the freight rate – would be made so enticingly low that any warning signs would be disregarded as the victim became consumed by the prospect of making a handy profit himself.

  And what had Claire told me? Follow the money. But I was getting ahead of myself. And Eleni would be getting impatient.

  CHAPTER 9

  ‘Ah! You’re here and you’re late,’ Eleni exclaimed. ‘As always.’

  It seemed to me that women who felt secure in their relationship would berate their partner, no matter what. Eleni certainly seemed to fit that pattern, and perhaps she had a point, but she would always forgive me later, after I had served my penance. I produced a bottle of wine, placed it on the counter and put my arms around her from behind.

  ‘Please don’t do that pethi-mou. It distracts me.’

  ‘You distract me, agapi-mou,’ I said kissing her neck.

  ‘Please, Angus, let me get on with the cooking and we muzzle later okay?’

  ‘Nuzzle, the word is nuzzle, and it’s a nice, loving thing to do.’

  ‘Yes, but not when I’m cooking
thank you.’

  I opened the wine. It felt good to be out of the office, away from work. And good to be with Eleni.

  ‘Why were you late?’ she asked trying to sound casual. ‘Were you nuzzling with that Zoe?’

  ‘Certainly not. She’s gone down to her parents’ place in Nafplion. She left hours ago. I was digging through some old files and just lost track of time.’

  ‘Is this to prove your crazy conspiracy theory, Angus? You should be careful you know. Don’t start pointing the finger at people if you’re not sure they are guilty.’

  I was beginning to agree. All I had was a hunch and a couple of coincidences. I didn’t even have anyone to point a finger at. Grant had already expressed scepticism, not to say irritation, and meanwhile I had cases stacking up that needed sorting out. Anyway, life was too short.

  ‘It’s just that wording in the Laytime clause,’ I said over dinner, immediately regretting that I’d brought the subject up again.

  ‘Laytime?’ she asked. ‘What is this Laytime anyway? It sounds a bit naughty to me. You know what I mean?’ she was gently rubbing my leg with her foot under the table. ‘Pour me more wine, Angus.’

  ***

  I left Eleni asleep despite the sunlight already streaming in through the bedroom window. She could sleep late in the mornings, a habit I’d lost long ago.

  I’d borrowed heavily to buy the flat a couple of years ago. It was on the top floor of a three-storey block perched atop Profitas Ilias. It had three good-sized bedrooms, one of which I’d furnished as an office, and views looking east over Micro Limano towards the Friendship Stadium, down the coast to Glyvada and beyond that to Vouliagmeni. All this came at such a price that I was beginning to doubt I’d ever pay off the mortgage. I’d already had to renegotiate the monthly repayments twice. Worse, the flat’s value had dropped by over twelve per cent since the financial crisis hit so I was deep into negative equity as well.

  But Profitas Ilias was a little haven, or hill to be precise, of relative tranquillity, if you could ignore the racket from the municipal open-air theatre, the bowling alley and the bars. But as Piraeus went I was fortunate. The traffic was negligible since it wasn’t on the way to anywhere, and being so steep, several of the routes that led up and down were by means of long flights of steps. This, when I wasn’t using the car, provided me with useful exercise, particularly in the evenings since the only way home was up the hill.

  Our lives, if not complete domestic bliss, were certainly settled. I wondered as I set out for the office, if that was why I had felt the need to pursue the frauds, looking for something that wasn’t there; was it simply to add a little excitement to what was becoming a staid existence?

  So that Saturday morning I walked down to the port before it became too hot or too busy. I stopped at Nikos’ and sat outside for croissants and an Americano, opening emails on my iPad as I waited. I tried to avoid opening them at home; if anyone needed me that badly they could always call, which they frequently did.

  ‘Kalitera then ginete, eh Gus?’ Nikos announced as he delivered my coffee. Nikos wasn’t always so optimistic but today he’d decided life ‘couldn’t be better’ and I appreciated such a positive start to the day, even if neither of us really believed it.

  But this morning my attention was focused on the screen in front of me. I’d gone into the Lloyd’s List app. The lead story was headed ‘Greek vessel missing presumed lost in Indian Ocean’. The sub-head was equally terse: ‘Kyriakou multi-purpose carrier last reported west of Cocos Keeling Islands.’

  Not much was known except that the ship was on passage from Durban to the port of General Santos on the southern Philippine island of Mindanao. She was carrying project cargo believed to be mining equipment, and her last reported position was 13° 5’ south, 96° 12’ east. She was, or had been, on a heading for the Sunda Strait. Ships in the area had been told to keep a lookout and the Indonesian and Australian navies and coastguards were on alert. The Cocos Keeling Islands were Australian territory, albeit with an extraordinary history of Scottish ownership, some five hundred or so nautical miles south-west of Java.

  The ship was owned by Andreas Kyriakou and his family. His fleet was not entered with the CMM so I didn’t get the usual sense of excitement mingled with anxiety that accompanied a casualty involving one of ours. But I did know the family, particularly Andreas’ youngest child Michael, the company’s insurance manager. And, as a freelance claims investigator, I was interested in any serious casualty involving a Greek vessel regardless of the owner’s P&I cover. I finished my coffee and headed for the office.

  CHAPTER 10

  I’d only been at my desk five minutes when the phone rang.

  ‘Forgive the racket, I’m outside.’ The screeching cacophony of cicadas in the background told me as much and the voice was familiar.

  ‘It’s a bit late for them isn’t it, Alastair?

  ‘Try telling them that. It’s still hot and they’re still at it.’ Alastair Marshall lived on an island in the northern Aegean.

  ‘I’m calling to ask when you and your charming young lady are going to pay me a visit.’

  As a widower, he complained of his solitary life though I knew he had friends visiting from every corner of the world. And he had his ancient housekeeper, Dimitra, and a one-eyed cat. Eleni and I had been up to visit him several times, though not for a year or more.

  ‘I’ve been busy, Alastair. I could do with a break but there’s a stack of cases …’

  ‘Quite understand, old boy. Listen, there’s another reason for the call. I’d like a private word. Are you on your own there?’

  ‘Sure.’

  Rear Admiral (ret’d) Alastair Marshall CBE was no more retired than I was, although he was into his late sixties. For as long as I’d known him he’d worked in an ‘advisory capacity’ for the International Maritime Task Force, a watchdog for crime at sea. Nowadays, piracy was top of its agenda, but transgressions of any kind in the world of shipping fell within its scope. Although the IMTF didn’t have powers of arrest or prosecution, it did enjoy close relations with Interpol and the intelligence community, so whilst it had no claws or teeth of its own, it certainly knew how to influence outcomes.

  ‘To be honest,’ he said, ‘I’m a bit disappointed with your friends in Leith.’

  ‘Oh, why’s that?’

  ‘Well, we’ve been spotting a number of nefarious activities lately – frauds I’m talking about. Normally your people are pretty good at keeping us in the loop but lately they’ve been a bit tardy. There’ve been a few cases we’ve heard about from cargo underwriters or other sources where I’d have expected to get reports direct from the CMM. That’s always been the understanding you know.’

  I did know. ‘I’ll talk to them if you like,’ I suggested cautiously. I was wondering where this was leading.

  ‘No need, Angus. I know you’re a freelance and I don’t want to make things awkward for you. I’ll have a word with Grant when I’m next over. But maybe you can keep me in the loop if you find yourself handling any of this kind of case? On the QT of course. Glad to help where I can.’

  ‘I appreciate that, Alastair.’

  ‘Not at all. But you know how we operate, and there’s a code of confidentiality you’re well aware of so keep it under your hat for now. As I say, I’ll have a quiet word with Grant too.’

  ‘Right, well there is one case.’ I gave him a quick rundown on the Sophia M. The IMTF had access to information and sources that I didn’t. I figured he might know more than I did, not right now perhaps but in the future.

  ‘That’s hugely helpful Angus. Just the kind of intel we like to get. As I say, let me know if you think we can help, and do come and visit. Why don’t we pencil in a date and we can go through things in a bit more detail when you’re up here?’

  ‘Sure, we’d like that,’ I said. ‘But was this one of the cases the IMTF knew of – the Sophia M?’

  ‘We did get wind of it yes, amongst others, and noth
ing more than you’ve just said. But it’s always good to get another perspective, and as I say the CMM’s been a bit relaxed about keeping us posted lately.’

  It was perfectly normal for P&I Clubs to share information with the IMTF. And if Alastair was going to take the issue up with Grant Douglas, fair enough. Why the CMM hadn’t been keeping the IMTF up to speed was most likely down to inefficiency on their part rather than anything sinister. In any case, I was beginning to tire of my conspiracy theory. It was all seeming less and less plausible.

  ‘Bad business about the Astro Maria, eh?’ Alastair muttered. ‘Good owner mind you.’

  ‘I’ve just read it on Lloyd’s List,’ I said. Someone was trying to get me on my mobile. I let it buzz. ‘Have you heard anything more?’

  ‘No. Still early days. No talk of survivors, or any wreckage for that matter. Do you know the owner?’

  ‘I’ve done some work for them in the past,’ I said, ‘but the ship’s not entered with the CMM.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I believe the whole fleet’s with the Scans isn’t it?’ Scandinavia boasted some of the biggest P&I Clubs and Kyriakou had been with the same one for years.

  ‘Anyway, how about we say the weekend after next up here? Try and get up on the Friday and we’ll make it a proper break for you.’

  ‘We’d love that, Alastair.’

  ‘Stay well, Angus and give my best wishes to your dear lady.’

  ‘I will,’ I said and left him with his cicadas.

  I’d hardly put the phone down when it rang again. It was Michael Kyriakou. He sounded grave which wasn’t surprising under the circumstances. Could I meet them? His father wished to speak with me.

  ‘Sure,’ I said as I saw my weekend evaporating.

  ‘Can you get down to our office and the helicopter will pick you up in half an hour.’ It wasn’t a question.

  ‘Make it forty-five minutes will you, Michael? There’ll be traffic on the coast road.’