Simon Ings by Painkillers the Novel

Author:Painkillers the Novel [Novel, Painkillers the]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2012-07-03T13:52:13+00:00

13.

Any ideas I had about becoming a latter-day Harry Palmer were quickly scotched, those first few weeks in the office. It was modern enough for its time I suppose, its workspaces arranged in little islands, its coffee point a comfortable if smoke-laden lounge where all the real work went on. But if at first this all seemed very Silicon Valley, very Bill Gates, I soon learned there was a good reason for it: for we were as severely desk-bound as any code-monkey rattling the bars at Microsoft, and our work was as far away from ‘police work’, as it’s popularly imagined, as it is possible to get.

There are three stages or levels of laundering. First, there’s the messy business of actually finding somewhere secure to hide your ill-gotten loot. Second there’s what’s euphemistically called ‘layering’, which is a middle-class way of saying ‘burying’. The more layers of mind-numbingly complex transactions you make with your dirty money, the cleaner it seems, if only because anyone who tries to follow the paper trail quickly ends up on Prozac. Then there’s integration: now your dirty money is indistinguishable from clean, you can feed it back into the economy: legitimate money making more legitimate money, the way Adam Smith and Margaret Thatcher intended.

At the dirty end of the business there’s a vibrant and well-lubricated social scene. A criminal mastermind (at least by his own estimation) meets a sharp broker (ditto) at some cocktail party or other - usually in Happy Valley - and gets him good and plastered. The next day the broker, all pie-eyed, is buying hair-of-the-dog for all his office pals on account of he just pulled this really great new client at last night’s shindig. And it’s only weeks or even months later, when his instructions get all muddled up - full of last minute changes, investments in unrelated third parties, purchased outside a regular custodial system, cancelled early, refunded to third-party accounts, or what you will - that your credulous broker starts getting a nasty taste in his mouth.

At the other end of the business - the end we had most to do with - is the slew of strategies, practices, legal obligations and compliances that are supposed to prevent this kind of scenario from ever happening.

If companies don’t put safety procedures in place, or more usually if they fail to comply with their own safety procedures, then they’re breaking the law. And the only way you find out about that is by chasing paper. Lots of paper. Mountains of bloody paper.

Maybe my old boss in Rio had a point about my buccaneering instinct, because soon my disappointment and frustration began to show in my work.

‘You can’t go pulling people around in bars. You haven’t the authority.’

‘For God’s sake, Frank,’ I said - and sank uninvited into the chair opposite him - ‘he knew when they approached him that the deal wasn’t straight. What kind of investments were they suggesting anyway?

Two-per cent. Who the hell invests clean funds at such

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