Trail of Greed: Fighting Fraud and Corruption... A Dangerous Game (6 page)

The other two were unknown to me but were introduced by Keith as Gavin Reid, his lawyer from Edinburgh, and Peter Gibson. No further identification was volunteered for him.

I agreed to a very quick beer, not wanting to be unsociable. We chatted for a few minutes about our chances in the upcoming Ryder Cup. Peter seemed a harmless enough chap, a bit nondescript. He didn’t have much to say because, as usual, Keith monopolised most of the conversation. The lawyer from Edinburgh didn’t volunteer much. He kept himself rather reserved, in a lawyer’s observation mode. He was a bit overweight and balding. A rather supercilious air about him. His weak chin and round, slightly bloodshot eyes said to me that he probably drank a bit too much. My guess seemed to be confirmed when he ordered a refill – large gin and tonic – before I had even drunk half of my beer.

When I had finished my drink I left them to it, promising to give Keith a call soon to fix up eighteen holes.

“This time I’ll beat you,” he said with his usual competitiveness – half smile, half deadly serious.

“We’ll see”, I replied and bade them all goodbye. After a simple late lunch I got on the phone to George who sounded glad to hear from me and asked all the right questions about how I was surviving on my own. He confirmed that Steven was still in Edinburgh and seemed to be doing rather well. There was talk of a permanent girlfriend and Helen was starting to think about grandchildren. He gave me Steven’s office number and his home number and said he was sure he would be happy to hear from me.

I tried the office number but he was unfortunately unavailable so I thought I’d leave it until the evening.

I got through to him just after seven and he sounded both pleased and surprised. I gave him an update on Callum whom he asked after.

I then explained, in very vague terms, the reason for my call.

“Steven, you’re now working as a financial journalist if I understand correctly from your father?”

“Yep. And I’m quite enjoying it, although a lot of it is much less glamorous than it sounds. Ploughing through Annual Reports, interviewing boring old farts who are only interested in making money – but it pays the rent.”

“Can you help me on something? Do you know anything about Ailsa Investment Management?

“Do you mean AIM, the outfit run by a guy called Alan Purdy?”

“Yes.” “Why do you want to know? Thinking of investing?” “Oh, no. It’s for a friend of mine who asked me about them. I had never heard of them but I told him I would try to find out.”

“I don’t know much but I’ll ask around for you. Is it urgent? I do know they are giving a conference the day after tomorrow at the Caledonia Conference Centre. I’m going along.”

“Good, so am I. It’s at eleven isn’t it? Why don’t I meet you beforehand and we’ll have a coffee. It would be good to catch up.”

He was up for that so we fixed a time and a place and I hung up.

I set off early on Wednesday morning to drive through to Edinburgh for my coffee date with Steven. I had decided that he could be a useful ally if it turned out that there was anything fishy about AIM and I was going to get him onside.

The drive down through Fife was, as always, nice and easy – easy from a traffic point of view and easy on the eye. Skirting round the east side of the Lomond Hills I drove down on the new fast road towards the Forth Road Bridge.

I have always loved the approach to North Queensferry. As a boy there had been no road bridge and we had had to make the crossing by ferry – a great adventure for a young boy.

But the old railway bridge had always been there – a magnificent monument to Victorian engineering skills. It is as much a symbol of Scotland as the Eiffel Tower is of Paris.

What makes it stand out so dramatically is the fact that it’s not spoilt by a town or city at either end. It spans the Forth about ten miles east of Edinburgh and stands in superb isolation above the grey waters of the Firth of Forth.

It was the first steel structure in Britain and was opened in 1890. It required sixty-five thousand tons of steel and God knows how many rivets.

Long may it stand. Steven was waiting for me at the agreed rendezvous. After exchanging welcomes and catching up on his career progress, I told him about my “friend” who had invested some money and wasn’t too happy about the performance and wondered if there was anything dodgy going on. I explained how I had agreed to go along and be a bit provocative and see what the reaction was.

“Listen, I’m going to try to upset him. We think there’s something behind the non-performance. When we go along you don’t know me. We’ll go in separately, but we can meet up afterwards during the farewell coffee or whatever. If there is anything fishy going on and Purdy gets uptight by my questions, and then sees me talking to a financial journalist, then he’s not going to be a very happy man. If you want to write an article on what you’ve seen or heard that’s ok with me but we do it as if you and I have no prior connection. Keep my name out of it. Tomorrow we can speak by phone and compare impressions. Then we can decide on next steps. OK ?”

Steven listened attentively. I stressed that I didn’t want him writing about our suspicions yet. If he reported the meeting straightforwardly, that was fine, but he wasn’t to start publically surmising yet. If we thought things were not right and we started digging he would be kept informed and we could decide together whether to go public or not, and when.

“Fine by me. Maybe I’ll get a good story out of it.” Little did he know that he was going to get several stories out of it.

As I entered the foyer of the vast glass building, a monument to modern architecture, having laboriously ascended the twenty-five granite steps leading up to the enormous revolving doors, I was asked two or three times if I needed any help. Was I perhaps lost? Was I sure I was in the right building?

I guess that jeans and brown leather loafers, topped off with a bright canary yellow, open-necked shirt, and covered with a light brown canvas jacket were not customary in this environment but I didn’t give a damn. I wanted the attention. I was past the age of needing to conform and I was determined to enjoy myself.

I walked up to the reception desk manned (or womanned?) by three bright young things, all smiles and lipstick, short skirts and plunging necklines, who dutifully gave me my badge and my welcome pack – a neat little canvas bag with logos plastered all over it containing the programme and a few advertising leaflets – and I was permitted to pass through into the auditorium.

I had procured an invitation through one of the few remaining contacts that I had in the Edinburgh financial world, so my badge carried my name but no company identification.

The auditorium was about a quarter full which gave me plenty of scope to choose a seat in a suitably strategic position. I chose one toward the middle, about five rows back from the front, right in front of the table behind which the various presenters would be sitting. I was pretty sure I would be noticed.

The auditorium gradually started to fill up as people straggled in, mainly in groups of two or three but with the occasional person on their own. It was a typical cross section of an audience for such an event – a couple of dozen elderly grey – or white-haired gentlemen in suits, shirts and ties – the old school, all around my age – a few little old ladies clearly there to keep an eye on what was happening to their savings, then the next generation: mostly male, most in their twenties, all texting furiously on their iPhones or consulting their iPads and ignoring everyone around them. I think if you asked them afterwards what the colour of the seats was or roughly how many people were there, they wouldn’t have a clue.

Perhaps thirty per cent of the younger generation was female – power-dressed in black or grey business trouser suits, sporting large “designer” handbags, (what is a “designer” handbag? I would have thought that every single handbag in existence had been “designed” by someone!), tossing their hair to the side to be able to slide the mobile phone against their ear. Heads tilted, earnest conversations taking place. The occasional wave to someone who passed. It gave the definite impression that it was all for show. Why not go out into the corridor to phone?

Two of the younger males sat down next to me – not so much as a “good morning” – and I received a full whiff of scented gel, mixed with the strong musky perfume of the girl in front. Fortunately on my other side I had a couple of guys of my generation who voiced the standard greetings and we exchanged a few normal comments about the weather, the traffic and last week’s rugby match. At least it was human contact.

At the appointed hour the three conference presenters mounted the four short steps at the side of the stage and took their places behind the table, each behind their own name plate. If they had got it right Mr Alan Purdy was sitting in the middle. I looked at him with interest. This was the man I had come to see. This was the guy that Pierre suspected was ripping him off.

He was about six feet tall and I guessed his age at around fifty-two or fifty-three. His face was starting to round out, the cheek bones no longer prominent and the beginnings of a jowl around his chin. The eyes under the slightly bushy eyebrows were blue and gave off the impression of a certain degree of intelligence. This impression was strengthened by a large forehead. He was smartly dressed in a three-piece suit, a blue and white striped shirt and a bright emerald green tie. A matching handkerchief had been thrust casually into his top pocket.

He was overweight – not yet dramatically, but on the way. But it was the mouth that bothered me. Set above a weak, slightly receding chin, his mouth was narrow, held in place by soft thickish lips. The overall first impression was of physical strength and relative good looks – a combination that, if not imbued by humility, tends to develop a liking for power. But that was only a first impression. I hoped that during the conference he would show more of the kind of man he was.

The master of ceremonies walked on to the stage, microphone in hand, beaming at everyone and proceeded to announce the beginning of the conference. Everyone quietened down. The younger crowd dutifully switched off their telephones; the older contingent folded away their newspapers.

This was probably the culmination of a couple of months of earnest work by the man with the microphone and he was basking in the attention. I won’t describe him because he didn’t really have very much to him that made him stand out. He was just one of these guys that do this sort of thing and as far as I was concerned he could have his moment of glory.

He told us how delighted he was with such a large attendance for the fourth annual conference on “Investing for You” (with a nice commission for him, I thought to myself), and proceeded to introduce the speakers. Each name was greeted with polite applause, a little bit more for Mr Alan Purdy, Chairman and Managing Director of Ailsa Investment Management, but not from me. I’m sparing with my applause – certainly when no one has done or said anything yet. Why should you applaud someone just for turning up? If what the speaker has to say is worth it, I’ll willingly applaud – at the end.

There were to be three presenters who would each speak for about half an hour and there would be twenty minutes of question time after each presentation, announced the MC. Mr Purdy, who was clearly the star of the show, would be speaking last – after a coffee break.

I was not in the least bit interested in the presentations on “Succession Planning” or “Tax-effective Investing”. I would let them drift by. Mr Purdy’s presentation was entitled “Winning with the Big Boys”, sub-titled “How the man in the street can gain as much as the large corporate investors”. Why he couldn’t have thought up a title which was self-explanatory and didn’t need a sub-title to explain what it meant I don’t know. Probably there was some deep marketing philosophy behind the idea.

The elder contingent listened with attention to the discussion on Succession Planning, which was not surprising. The question session lasted about fifteen minutes and various people could be seen taking notes. After all, if they could pass on as much of their wealth to their children and grandchildren without the taxman grabbing half of it, why not?

Needless to say, each discourse had been accompanied by a bloody Power Point presentation. The “Succession” man treated us to a plethora of family trees with arrows flying all over the place. There was even one which simulated a situation of two men who had formed a civil partnership and adopted two kids, one of which had produced two grandchildren!

The taxman’s contribution was a series of slides containing reams of words and numbers and percentages. He proceeded to read them to us, presumably on the basis that he thought we couldn’t read them ourselves.

In spite of the fact that he had announced that we would all receive a hard copy afterwards, the younger generation earnestly scribbled away on notepads. He overran his time by about ten minutes, but that didn’t really matter because there were only two questions at the end – both of which were unnecessary because the answers had already been given in the presentation.

We had a short break for coffee in the lobby. I knew nobody, apart from Pierre and Steven, so I stayed off on the side, observing the sheep networking. After a couple of minutes a lady nervously approached me and held out her hand.

“Good morning,” she said somewhat nervously. “Are you enjoying the conference?”

I smiled down at her. She looked about ten years older than me, in her mid-seventies perhaps and was wearing a powder blue suit, the jacket over a white blouse adorned with a pearl necklace. Nothing to indicate poverty or wealth. Just a nice person. Her hair was white and neatly kept. She was sporting a black patent leather handbag, clutching a brown foolscap envelope under her hand bag arm and trying not to spill the coffee in her other hand.

“Here, let me help you.” I took the cup from her, placed it on the table beside us and turned back to answer her question.

“To be honest, the first two presentations bored me rigid. I really just came to hear what Mr Purdy has to say.”