Tom Clancy - Command Authority

“Which criminal group, specifically?”

“Unknown.”

Sandy looked bored again. “Go on.”

“Anyway, a month after the Galbraith deal, this tiny little Panamanian-registered company whose only physical location is a small-town Russian liquor store managed to get an unsecured sixty million euro loan from a Swiss bank that regularly does business with shady offshore corps all over the world. It used this loan to purchase a gas pipeline management company in Bulgaria. Then, a month after that, it bought a pipeline management company in Slovenia for ninety million euros, and another in Romania for one hundred and thirty-three million.

“IFC has dozens of legal entities, all new, and each with accounts in one of the offshore financial centers. Cyprus, Caymans, Dubai, British Virgin Islands, Panama. But one thing I’ve noticed about all these companies”—Ryan flipped through some pages, looking for something specific—“every last one of these companies also has a branch office in Saint John’s, Antigua.”

“A branch office?”

Jack shrugged. “They are all just drop boxes or business suites. There is nothing physically there that ties them to Antigua. To tell you the truth, I don’t understand that part of it at all. Sure, I get it, Antigua is an offshore banking haven, but these companies already reside in other offshore banking havens. Why do they all have to be tied to Antigua as well?”

Sandy thought it over for a moment. “The quick-and-easy answer is the real owner of this constellation of enterprises has a connection to Antigua.”

“What sort of connection?”

“Citizenship would be my guess.”

Ryan looked at Lamont as though he’d lost his mind. “Sandy, I hate to be accused of racial profiling, but I can promise you the oligarch, government bigwig, or mob boss who just made one-point-two billion dollars in a Kremlin-backed scheme in Vladivostok was not born in some Third World town in the West Indies.”

Sandy shook his head. “No, Ryan. Didn’t say he hails from there. Antigua is one of the few nations where you can show up on a plane, hand someone some cash… I’d say fifty thousand U.S. dollars would cover it, and then get yourself a brand-new passport. They hand out citizenship for a price.”

“Why would you want to do that?”

“A few reasons. Probably the most relevant is that only citizens of a nation can open up banks in that nation.”

Jack was thoroughly confused now. “Why would you open your own bank? Even with banking secrecy laws inside a nation, if you want to do business with another bank—and banks pretty much have to do business with other banks—the other bank needs to be able to trust you. Some shady Russian with a suspicious passport isn’t going to be transferring cash to Citibank from the Antigua Bank of Ivan or whatever the hell he calls it.”

Sandy laughed. “I love your energy, Jack, but you are a babe in these woods, aren’t you? You are correct, many offshore banks lack the licenses to trade with the big boys, but there are ways around that. The Antigua Bank of Ivan, as you call it, just needs to find itself an intermediary bank, someone just slightly better positioned in the banking world that is willing to do business with shady characters. A handsome bribe to a bank official should do the trick. That intermediary will transfer Ivan’s funds to another intermediary—by now we should have the money upstream to Switzerland or Liechtenstein or Madeira, somewhere still nontransparent but more respected than bloody Antigua. And from here the money can go anywhere—USA, UK, or, as I would venture to guess in the Galbraith Energy case, back to Russia.”

“Why would it go back to Russia?”

The Englishman said, “It’s a classic money-laundering scheme called round-tripping. Basically, they take money earned from corruption—theft of property, bribes, organized-crime proceeds, whatever—then they send the money to holding companies in one of these offshore financial centers, where the money is moved to another holding company and then back into Russia as clean funds in the form of foreign investments.”

“Damn,” muttered Ryan. “I still have a lot to learn.”

“You do, lad. But you’re a quick study.” Lamont looked at his watch. “All of this is very interesting, from an academic point of view, but these shell companies pop up and disappear with such ease, if you don’t have a handle on the actual ownership structure, meaning names of real people, you’ll never get anywhere near the money. We’ll never know who is on the board of this IFC company, or any of its entities. They work very, very hard to keep that information secret, and they are bloody good at it. You’ve seen all the documentation.”

Jack’s eyes slowly began to relight. “I have. All the documents are designed to hide the owner, but what if we know where his bank is?”

Sandy scratched his head. “What are you on about?”

“All these companies in Antigua I mentioned. They are all registered in the same building.”

“Not uncommon at all. There will be a registered agent, a company that can help you get a passport, lawyers to help you set up your tax-haven accounts. They will use a physical address set up just for that purpose. No real affiliation with the ownership.”

Jack said, “The bank will be close by, won’t it?”

“It won’t be a retail location, lad. No cash machine and tellers. It will just exist on paper, with accounts in other transfer banks. There will be a lawyer who set the whole thing up, but these guys don’t exactly advertise on the Internet or post on Facebook. They play this game quietly.”

Jack said, “I want to look at the registered agent more closely. I mean, see the building for myself.”

Sandy shrugged. “Sure. I do that, just for fun. Google Maps will get you a picture of the building.”

Jack shook his head. “That’s not what I mean. I want to go down there. Poke around a little.”

Lamont just stared for a moment. “ Physically? You want to physically go?”

“Sure.”

“Why not hire a local investigator in Antigua to go for you?”

“Sandy, you said yourself I’m still a babe in the woods. I can read the paperwork or study the structure of the shells on SPARK, and I can hire someone to investigate in country, but I’ll get a better understanding of it all if I just fly down there on my own. Take a day or two to see the locations, get a feel for these offshore operations. Maybe even learn something about IFC Holdings and the other entities with corporate addresses there.”

Sandy didn’t like the idea. He tried once more to dissuade Ryan. “What do you plan on doing? Looking through the bloody garbage of the registration agent?”

Jack smiled. “That’s a good idea.”

Sandy blew out a long sigh. “I don’t think you understand what you’re dealing with. I’ve been on-site before. Trust me, mate, these sketchy Third World financial operations centers will be protected by some rough-and-tumble characters. On top of this, there are mob and drug gangs down there who have a vested interest in keeping the prying eyes of foreign investigators away from the companies they use to launder their proceeds. You are the son of the President of the United States. You aren’t used to mixing it up with hooligans.”

Jack did not answer.

“You might not get the full picture from a spreadsheet or a PowerPoint, but it’s a lot safer to sit at your desk and learn what you can.”

“Sandy, tourists go down to Antigua and Barbuda all the time. I’m not planning on pushing my luck. Trust me, I’ll fit right in.”

Sandy leaned his head back in the chair and stared at the ceiling for a long time. Finally he said, “If you do this, I can’t let you go alone.”