Nine Lives - Danielle Steel Page 0,63
Is all that stuff true? Do you think he’ll go to jail?” Aden hadn’t met Paul yet, but he idolized him and hated the idea that he might be a crook. So did Maggie. She was worried about it too.
“I don’t know,” she said. “All I know is what you read too. He hasn’t called me, and I haven’t been able to reach him. I think he’s an honest man, but you don’t always know people as well as you think.” To both of them, this seemed huge and frightening if the accusations were true and he was in as much trouble as they said. “I’ll let you know as soon as I hear something. There has to be an explanation.” But she wasn’t sure, and doubt and fear were gnawing at her.
“I hope so, Mom,” Aden said, worried for her too, on the chance that she could somehow be implicated also because of her close association with him. It had crossed Maggie’s mind as well. She didn’t know what to think.
Late that night, she finally heard from Paul. He sounded tired but calm. There was no panic in his voice and he apologized profusely for not calling her for nearly four days.
“I’ve been on the phone constantly with lawyers in four countries, and tax authorities here in the U.K. and in the U.S. Bottom line, they don’t like my corporate setups, but I’ve always been careful to stay just this side of the line. What we’ve done isn’t illegal, but undeniably we’ve kept my money out of the hands of the tax guys in both countries whenever we could. We knew it might come to this one day, but it’s been worth it. And we’ve known there was something brewing for the last three or four weeks, but I didn’t want to worry you. We’ve been creative, but not dishonest. Tax laws keep changing so it’s easy to find yourself on the wrong side of the line, but we keep a close eye on it. Whenever the laws changed, we shifted our setup to accommodate them. They’re going to have a hell of a time proving that I did something wrong. Sometimes how you read the law is a matter of interpretation. It’s not always crystal clear. I’ve got corporations in Hong Kong, Luxembourg, the Bahamas, the Cayman Islands, Japan, the U.K., and the U.S. We knew that they’d object to Luxembourg eventually, and they don’t like the Cayman Islands, but I pay hefty taxes in the States. In the end, after they try to shake me up for a while, it’ll come to a negotiation about how much I’ll pay, but they have to make a lot of noise first to scare me. I’ll lose some money on this, but hopefully not too much. And it has saved me a lot till now. I know it sounds bad, but I’m not worried. I took the risk that part of the roof might fall in one day, but not the whole house. I’ll probably have to repatriate a nice chunk of change back to the U.S., which is infuriating, but just the way it is. Most of my investments are still safe offshore and will stay that way, owned by sheltered corporations they can’t invade. I’ve been protecting myself for a long time, and they know it. They hate that. I have money in Malta too, which the Brits and the U.S. can’t touch.”
“It sounds like a lot of work keeping it all straight,” Maggie said softly. She didn’t like his operating so close to the line of the law.
“It is a lot of work, but it’s worth it. I’ve been lucky. I’ve made a lot of money and invested it well. I’m not going to give that up if I don’t have to. What I’ve done is legal, it’s just complicated to put it in place, and I spent a lot of money doing it. I have an Irish passport too, which was useful at one point, but less so now, since they changed the laws on that again.”
He sounded amazingly calm as he explained it to her. It was so typical of him to take an enormous risk, no matter what the consequences later on. He dealt with it when it happened, like his racing suit on fire when he crashed. He put the flames out then, and was willing to total the car to win the race. But who was winning this time? The