After leaving Trinity Square, Robert Ashby headed back to Fenchurch St. In disgust, he threw his cigar in the gutter.
The brokers weren’t expecting a double bluff. Grant thought he’d trumped Plantation by threatening liquidation. Ashby had dared him to do it and suffer the consequences : the shipowners – and City First would be cutting their own throats.
If the Greeks were to carry out their threat, they would have to pay a huge amount in legal fees before they could push on to the hearing. If the outcome required Plantation to pay twenty million pounds, Ashby might well say the company didn’t have it. Plantation would call in a liquidator and there would be almost nothing left in the pot after the taxman, VAT man, banks and everyone with secured debts were paid. The owners of the Stratos would have an unsecured debt with a place at the back of the queue of creditors and would get what was left – next to nothing – and would have to wait years to get even that. Thanakis had been warned of this by Ridgeford Anthony but the Greeks were out for revenge. In the British courts, vengeance can be an expensive and empty exercise.
The satisfaction of winding up Plantation would be costly and achieve nothing in the way of payment : Ashby had feigned disbelief that the shipowners would actually pull the trigger in what was now a game of Russian roulette. Was he really prepared to lose his father’s legacy ? If he was, his majority shareholding and control of Plantation would go. All of the company’s valuable goodwill and clientele in London and abroad, pieced together by his father over forty years would go. Then there were the employees and their years of experience. They would all go. Was he seriously intending to risk it all ? (Unknown to Ashby, it was what Grenville and Black were waiting to grab.)
Whether he would risk losing the lot, he couldn’t say – at least, at that precise moment. He didn’t know much about the six claims and the company’s financial position. If all of the six were genuine losses, including the Captain Stratos and the company only had funds for another month, then winding up Plantation would be inevitable. For the time being anyway, no-one could say with certainty what the company’s position was.
Meanwhile back at Trinity Square, after Ashby had departed, Grant had gone back up the corridor to the Tower Hill end of the building and a different conference room where Spiro Thanakis was waiting.
“Well ? What did he say ?” demanded Thanakis impatiently.
“He isn’t worried if Plantation is liquidated. And he mentioned the subject of fraud. They seem to think that something funny happened to the Captain Stratos and that’s why they won’t pay.”
“Fraud ? This is just a smoke screen. Anyhow, never mind that. Is he going to pay ?”
“In a word….no. No, he isn’t.”
“So, they still won’t pay – even though they know we will finish them.”
“Maybe they’ve just….run out of money.”
“Fine. We will pay the lawyers tomorrow and we will liquidate them – we’ll shut them down and then we’ll see who is bluffing.”
“Spiro, even if that happens, you won’t get anything out of them.”
“We don’t care. We will have the greatest satisfaction that if our owners in Piraeus lose everything, they will take Plantation with them. We will pay the lawyers what they want and we will be in the court to demand justice.”
“I doubt you’ll get it – ‘justice’ quite often, isn’t what you’d expect.”