The Bezzle is set against a background of fast moving geopolitics, as China is plunged into a deep crisis after the collapse of its real estate and construction market, aggravated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the threat of all out war in the Middle East.
It commences when Michael D’Arcy, a special advisor to Sir Patrick Kennedy, head of the INI Banking Corporation, is summoned to George Town on the Cayman Islands, where he is to assist Edouard Wang who arrives from China charged with a secret mission by his father, Henry Wang, CEO of the Delta Group, a large diversified Chinese holding, specialised in construction and commodities.
Unexpectedly Lucy, Edouard’s sister appears. She and Michael have had an on-off relationship complicated by his detention and escape from a Chinese prison in Shanghai, where he had been held pending trial on accusations of economic espionage by the Guoanbu, China’s equivalent to the CIA and FBI combined.
Michael and Edouard leave for Cancun to meet the Delta Group’s partner in Mexico, where Henry Wang is planning a diversification programme following the economic crisis in China and Xi Jinping’s brutal crackdown on business. During this time Lucy, an ambitious young archaeologist, leaves on a trip to a Mayan site in Guatemala where new discoveries are being made.
Excerpt:
It was just before seven in the morning. I was standing on the terrace of La Lancha, a hotel overlooking Lake Peten Itza, in Flores, Guatemala. I was up unusually early. My programme for the day, a visit to a recently discovered Mayan temple in the Parque Nacional El Mirador, accompanied by a local guide who was waiting for me somewhere in the hotel.
As I admired the view across the lake, I couldn’t help thinking how far away China was and how good fortune had smiled on me.
I worked for Sir Patrick Kennedy, the renowned City banker. I was his man, at least one of them, but the latest in date. I think he must have felt he owed me something after I’d ended up in a Shanghai jail. No doubt it reminded him of his own little-known run-in with Irish justice a quarter of a century earlier, when he’d briefly found himself in Dublin’s Mountjoy prison, unwittingly caught up in a money laundering scam linked to Colombian drug cartels and the Russian Mafiya.
I, my family that is, were part of Kennedy’s clan, it was thanks to that I had been engaged by the Fitzwilliams Foundation, an emanation of the INI Banking Corporation, a multinational group headed by Sir Patrick.
My role at the foundation was the study and investigation of geopolitical events and their effect on the bank’s business, enabling its management to take the measures necessary to offset damage or take advantage of changes—wherever they occurred. My general field was business, industry, raw material extraction, energy, environmental impact and climate change.
As such, I had considerable freedom and means to carry out Kennedy’s orders in his fast moving universe, one that spanned a large part of the planet, from Hong Kong to the Caribbean and Central America, passing by London and of course Dublin.
At that precise moment, as I anticipated the pleasure of my visit to El Mirador, Henry Wang must have been feeling down. Far away on the other side of the world in Shanghai, the bad news piled-up, presenting him with a series of complex decisions.
Henry Wang was a business ‘tycoon’, a word that came from the Japanese taikun which meant Great Lord, though in Chinese he was called a jutou, a big player, which I suppose he was, if his money was anything to go by.
He was worth a couple of billion dollars, but Henry was a worried man, which seemed to confirm the saying ‘money doesn’t buy happiness’.
And Henry had every reason to be worried, his real estate construction business was slithering to a halt with the Chinese economy entering a period of almost zero growth, something that was unknown in modern times, at least for anyone in China under the age of 50.
During the four plus decades, since the death of Mao, China had been transformed from a peasant society into the world’s economic power house, driving growth and expansion across the planet, making men like Henry rich. But now, it seemed that those halcyon days were past and to make matters worse, tycoons like him were not only going bust, they were disappearing, arrested by the police, accused of economic crimes as the Chinese Communist Party scrambled to place the blame for the disaster on anyone else but their leaders.
The Delta Group, Henry’s firm, a diversified conglomerate, was faced with multiple difficulties, but these were not as bad as those of certain other businesses. He had been wise, far seeing, diversifying into different sectors and above all investing overseas.
During the three or so years since I was admitted into the inner sanctum of the London based foundation, I had accumulated more experience in the workings of international business than could be have been taught in any business school or desk job in the City of London. That time had been a period of intense on the ground learning, in East and Southeast Asia, and more recently Central America.
To whom did I report?
To Sir Patrick of course, though on a day to day basis to John DeFrancis, president of the foundation and close friend of Sir Patrick’s.
The business of Kennedy’s INI group was essentially corporate banking, providing financial services for large and medium businesses, and high net worth individuals. Services that included, investment, wealth management and private banking. In addition it provided over-the-counter retail banking services, but only in the UK and Ireland.
And what precisely did I report?
Well, it all started out with a research programme into deforestation and illegal logging in Southeast Asia and the Pacific Rim. The Fitzwilliams Foundation had planned to present a paper at the 2021, Climate Change Conference, COP26, in Edinburgh, a report on tropical timber trafficking, a multi-billion dollar business, from the islands that made up most of those regions.
This led me to China and Shanghai where I met Henry Wang. In fact it was Lucy who presented me to Henry, her father, head of the Delta Group, who was into real estate, construction, building supplies and commodities, including timber as well as diversified investments.
For my trouble I ended up in prison, a detention centre, on the edge of Shanghai’s International Airport, accused by the Chinese Ministry of State Security of economic espionage.2
After a dramatic escape, organised by my Uncle John Ennis, I was dispatched to Central America by Sir Patrick, where my task was to report on Costa Rica as a potential site for an investment programme he was planning in the region. There I was introduced to the western end of that chain of outposts which formed the City of London’s offshore banking network, namely Panama, Belize and those familiar Caribbean islands.
It was there I ran into the Delta Group again. Henry Wang like many other Chinese businessmen and companies had offshore holdings in the British Virgin Islands, including the giants Evergrande and Alibaba.
Why offshore companies and trusts? For the very simple reason you could do anything you liked with them, and hidden from public view.
John DeFrancis, head of the Fitzwilliams Foundation, had explained to me how their existence, the islands that is, went a long way to explaining why the UK had left the EU. And why men like David Cameron and Boris Johnson, solid members of the British establishment, set the UK on the path to Brexit.
A lot of things fell into place after my discovery of those fortuitous outposts of empire, among them the improbable appointment of Lord ‘Call me Dave’ as foreign minister of the UK. A decision that was enough to undermine any normal person’s faith in politics, especially when it emerged that he had acted as spokesman for China’s BRI port project in Sri Lanka.
The Sri Lankan Port City, constructed by the Chinese state-owned firm, China Harbour Engineering Company, had plunged the small country into debt, forcing it into letting the port to China on a 99 year lease, whilst the UK’s newly appointed foreign minister pocketed 210,000 dollars for his words of encouragement, probably paid into some offshore account.
Cameron naturally protested he had acted on behalf of KPMG Sri Lanka, part of the international law firm that operated in the City of London. He had praised in glowing terms the BRI report made by another City law firm, PricewaterhouseCoopers, commissioned by the Chinese state company, designed to curry favour for the project.
Unsurprisingly, the Chinese firm in question had been blacklisted by the US for militarising disputed islands of the South China Sea.
It reminded me of how, in the same way, Moscow had sought to influence the 2016 Brexit referendum with the object of breaking the cohesion of the European Union. It was part of their strategy in a hybrid war to influence the hearts and minds of Europeans and NATO, waged through political interference and disinformation.
All that seemed very abstract, academic, distant, and it was.
