*
To Fitzwilliams’ uncontrollable chagrin he had been forced out of his position as chairman in a bloodless coup, mounted by transient politicians, government functionaries and a predatory banker.
Looking at Bloomberg, saw the Footsie 100 share index had fallen a little less than one percent and INI just under five percent. Not that big a deal in terms of market reaction, he noted grimly.
If Michael Fitzwilliams had been eschewed of his position as chairman of the group, the Fitzwilliams family still had their word to say in the London bank and to varying degrees in the bank’s different holdings, most notably in the Dublin entity. However, they did not have a controlling interest in any of these.
As to its holding in INI Hong Kong Ltd, London did not own the controlling interest, though with 26% of the shares it was marginally the largest individual shareholder. Various Liu family members federated slightly over 30% in the Hong Kong entity and this along with shares held by other local companies and holdings, could in concert constitute, according to the Hong Kong Ordinance, the controlling vote in a board decision.
Other minority shareholders included the Fitzwilliams family and Tarasov’s Moscow Bank. How much Pat Kennedy controlled was not clear, but it was at least 15% of the bank’s shares.
INI Hong Kong Ltd., was specialised in private and corporate banking, trusts and investments. It offered bespoke services for entrepreneurs and their families in the domain of wealth management, more notably: development, preservation and succession. In other words it offered very wealthy Chinese protection from their own government.
For the average man, the functioning of a private bank was opaque; it was intended to be, so opaque that governments and their different fiscal authorities could not penetrate the secrets of those who banked their money with them. Offshore accounts, in Panama, Hong Kong or some island territory, held by screen companies - one hiding the other like matryoshka dolls - grouped in holdings, trusts and other structures protected by an impenetrable veil of secrecy. They served not only the seriously rich, but also high net worth individuals such as Jack Reagan, Tom Barton or Steve Howard, to whom investment risk seemed the most natural of things, but regarded paying excessive taxes as confiscatory, legalised larceny.
As such they were not alone, it was almost a tradition for all those who had accumulated or inherited wealth, including royalty, aristocracy, old money and proletarian sportsmen, actors, entertainers and above all corrupt politicians, elected and non-elected leaders, wherever they were, including those of Russia and China.
Accepting Herring’s advice, Fitzwilliams pulled himself together, a few days of peace and quiet were really what was needed to calmly reflect on his own future and no where was better than his estate in Ireland.
He reached for his phone to put the bank’s jet on standby, then remembered he no longer disposed of that service. Reluctantly he looked up an air charter service and booked a private jet to fly him to Dublin late that same morning.
PARIS
Pat O’Connelly was glued to the TV in his Paris appartment. Little by little he had unconsciously become one of those Parisian bobos, bourgeois-bohèmes, better to well-off intellectuals, who mixed with ordinary folk in the pretence of sharing their daily drudge.
Suddenly his complacency was shaken. With the deliberate attack on Charlie Hebdo and the cold blooded killing of writers, journalists and commentators, life in Paris would no longer be the same.
If the attack wasn’t a declaration of war then what was? A latent civil war was brewing, there was no mistaking it, he thought as he watched the same shocking images of men firing Kalashnikov in the streets of Paris repeated in an endless loop.
O’Connelly, a successful novelist, liked to think of himself as another Parisian. He use the Paris metro for getting around town just like any other anonymous citizen, a habit that gave him an unambiguous view of life in Paris.
To a lesser degree than most other bobo’s, who studiously avoided talk of France’s changing face, he refrained from openly criticising the transformation. But now, there it was on the TV screen in his living room, a senseless killing a few city blocks from his upmarket appartment, carried out by men who had declared war on France and its way of life.
Those who spoke of France being colonised by its former colonies were spot on, there was no mistaking it. In the ten years he had lived in the city he had observed the changes, only half agreeing with the establishment’s politically correct arguments. Whatever the politicians said, there was not the least doubt that France was changing, the French were not French, at least the kind of French they had been in the mind’s eye of the world since the Belle Époque.
The French press, as always, paid lip service to the government, the proof was there for all who cared to look. Reporters without Frontiers situated France in forty fifth position in their table Freedom of the Press, slipping, in the space of a few years, from tenth position.