PART SEVEN
LONDON
In spite of Pat’s impatience, Lili insisted on arriving late. It was Michael Fitzwilliams’ invitation so there was little point in them getting to the restaurant before him.
Fitzwilliams, the now former head of the City banking group, had not only suffered the humiliation of being evinced as CEO, he had also lost his fabulous pay package of around eight million pounds, including allowances to circumvent EU caps, pension fund contributions, the use of the company jets, cars and other perks. It was more than that of Sir Alec Hainsworth, the head of City & Colonial.
The difference was that he, Michael Fitzwilliams, was not some kind of a stupendously overblown salaryman, his family had founded the bank and he was still a significant shareholder, further more, it was he who had built the bank into the international banking group it had become since he took over the reins in 2000.
Over the course of fifteen years he had changed it from a middling Irish savings bank to one respected in banking and business circles from London to Hong Kong, and it was for that reason he believed Westminster and his enemies had schemed together to swindle him out of what was rightly his.
His lawyer, James Herring, was still investigating the legality of City & Colonial’s takeover. Herring challenged the right of the Bank of England’s authority over an international private bank in view of the fact it was part of a Luxembourg holding. He argued the process in which INI had been declared imperilled by the change of ownership of its partner, InterBank, was spurious. InterBank’s sequestration under Russian law did not affect the functioning of INI in London, since the Moscow bank continued to operate under the tutelage of the Russian Ministry of Finance, administered by the state controlled Sberbank, one of the world’s largest financial institutions.
In launching his counter attack Fitzwilliams needed to rally his friends and associates, starting with Pat Kennedy, in whose interest it was to recover control of INI Banking Corporation plc and its holdings.
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