Plantation A Legal Thriller

by J M S Macfarlane

  Chapter 22

  The following morning, it was Ashby’s third day back in London. After a walk around the office, he saw that half of the staff were on leave, had left, were ill or saw no point in going to work when there was no work to do. The brokers were tightening the thumb-screws so that no new business was coming in the door and a steady drift of clients was going elsewhere.

  At managerial level, Plantation’s three remaining underwriters were all in their offices, trying to hold the fort. It was to them that Ashby turned as he knew them well and that he and they were on the same wave-length : all four of them together understood the clients, the contracts, the brokers, the legal process and the claims set-up. And all four of them represented the absolute core of the company.

  He ignored anyone from Stirling and viewed them as saboteurs who had visited a catastrophe on the company. He hadn’t yet learned how the sorry mess had begun. He was convinced that his father had somehow been misled. At some point, he would look into it to see what had gone on.

  When he assembled the underwriters together in the board room, he absolved them of all their normal duties until further notice.

  “For the moment, don’t worry about any of that – it’ll look after itself. What I want you to concentrate on is this – we are on the edge of a precipice. If you value your jobs and your careers, you’ll listen carefully to what I have to say.” He leaned back in his chair and appeared tense. “Before I begin, do any of you have a cigarette ? I don’t smoke, but for some unknown reason, I think it would aid my concentration.” And after one of them gave him a French Gitanes and awkwardly lit it for him, he picked up the thread of where he’d left off.

  “Plantation is on the point of collapse….you know it and I know it – but amazingly, I think we can save it. How do I know that ? I know – because my father would never have allowed it to crash – and because I knew him as well as I know myself. He would never have given up – and of that, I’m certain. And if he’d been alive today, I’m sure his strategy for rescuing the company would have been known by everyone. Only his death prevented it. Now….if he had a strategy, what was it ? What was he trying to do ? Knowing him, he would have had some ideas in place for quite a while. He wouldn’t have left it until the last moment, you can be sure of that. You all knew him and the way he worked : can you imagine him just forgetting about six of the largest claims the company had ever had in its entire history ? There was mention of fraud in some of his papers and I can smell it a mile off – these six claims are duds – and it’s up to us to prove they are.”

  “Of course, Rob, if you think we could help – but where would we start ?” said one of the underwriters.

  “I need you as a group to work with me on the six claims so that we can find out what my father was doing and how we can close them down. It was an impossible task he set himself, to sort them all out on his own and with just the claims manager as back-up. All of you will know what to do, to find out what’s really gone on since each loss was reported. Together, we can go from there. Simon, you’re the marine underwriter. What’s your view of it ?”

  Simon Wells had been a ship’s captain five years earlier and had a master’s ticket for most ocean-going vessels with the exception of oil tankers.

  “We’ve got problems in the Stratos claim, haven’t we ? And the Victor Oil claim. ”

  “Too right we have,” said Ashby. “The Captain Stratos is the most urgent as there’s a hearing in the High Court next Wednesday. Liz, would you and Guy be able to give Simon a hand, just on the Stratos claim for the time being until we find out where we are with it and if we’ve got a defence or not.”

  Liz Cordery and Guy Rutherford both wrote non-marine business – everything from office buildings in Israel to railroads in Chile to accountants in Singapore.

  “So where do we start ?”

  “Find out all you can about the Captain Stratos. Get hold of all the files and the papers from the claims section and have a look through the witness evidence. From what I can see, the data doesn’t add up in this claim – something’s altogether wrong about it.”

  “The data ? What data ? The amount of the claim ?”

  “No. I’m talking about the probability factors – the percentage chance that the ship, the Captain, crew and cargo were all lost together. The risk equations take a different direction from the accepted story. Also, the brokers are hinting at doing a deal. Yet no-one can really say what happened and there’s nothing to prove the ship was even lost.”

  “Risk equations ?”

  “Never mind about that for the moment. I’ll explain it all when we have more time.”

  After he verified, as far as he could, that Plantation had all the legal paperwork in the case, Ashby dictated a fax letter. It was sent within the hour to Thomas, cordially thanking him for his work on the Stratos claim and any other cases he was handling for Plantation and giving him his marching orders on all of them. He omitted any mention of a bill : if Plantation was going to burn to a cinder, it wouldn’t matter if Thomas, Stonehouse and Fulton all went unpaid. From what he could see, none of them had been of any use. They’d taken the line always taken by lawyers – if in doubt, advise the worst. Let them sue the company, he thought and be ranked as unsecured creditors. And good luck to them.

  Thomas received the letter and immediately, as anticipated, sent extortionate invoices by return fax later in the day which all went unanswered and were filed in Ashby’s dustbin.

  The same day, Thomas issued a summons to remove his firm’s name from the court record. It was distributed to everyone in the case. Very quickly, Grant, Wellbourne and Keen became aware that Plantation no longer had lawyers representing it. This was interpreted as a sign of panic by Ashby – the case was as good as won by the Greeks. When he heard the news, Thanakis was ecstatic and opened a bottle of champagne.

  “The money is ours,” he told his principals in Piraeus.

  Icing was added to the cake after Frances Keen reported some gossip heard from her opposite number at Thomas & Associates : Ashby had implied by certain remarks after their recent conference, that he wouldn’t be settling Thomas’s bill. Until that happened, Thomas’s legal notes and files would be held on a ‘lien’ – legal gobbledygook that entitled Thomas (in those days) to hang onto them until Plantation had paid its bill in full. The brokers thought Ashby would be helpless without the basic information and documents to defend the claim.

  Thanakis was exultant. “Serves them right for holding out so long. Just the interest alone on twenty million should have forced them to the negotiating table.”

  “Speaking of which,” said Grant, “Ashby has agreed to see me today at five o’clock. And I wouldn’t be celebrating just yet. You still have your own legal fees to pay if the hearing goes ahead. Even if we won hands down, it would probably push Plantation into insolvency. The shipowners would rank as unsecured creditors. They’d be lucky to recover their own legal fees....No, this meeting could be decisive for us – the main card we have to play is the threat of liquidation, rather than actually doing it. If it came to that, we would probably be shooting ourselves in the foot. If Ashby wants to save his company, he’ll have to come to terms – that is what he must understand.”