The Scottish Banker of Surabaya - By Ian Hamilton Page 0,35
a teapot and two mugs on a tray. He put it on the coffee table and then sat in a chair directly across from her. “Are you really an accountant?” he asked.
She took a card from her notebook and put it on the table.
Lam picked it up. “Offices in Hong Kong and Toronto, but no addresses.”
“We don’t have a walk-in type of clientele.”
“What kind do you have?”
“The kind who have lost a lot of money and have exhausted the conventional ways of recovering it.”
“Ah.”
“Do you mind?” she said, reaching for the teapot. When he said nothing, she poured tea into both mugs.
“So you are here to try to get their money back?” he asked, his hand shaking as he took the mug.
“I’d like to start by finding out what happened to it, and then we’ll take it from there.”
“Well, it’s gone. All of it,” he said.
She sipped her tea, her eyes focused on his. He tried to return her stare, but whatever confidence he might have had collapsed. His head dropped to his chest, tears spilling down his cheeks.
“You can take your time,” she said. “But I really need to know what happened.”
Lam sobbed and his hand began to shake more fiercely, tea splashing out of the mug. She reached over and took it from him and put it back on the tray.
“I’ve lost my career. I’ve lost every friend I ever had,” he said.
“What happened?” she urged.
He tilted his head back and began to breathe deeply through his nose. Gradually he gathered himself, and after another minute of deep breathing he reached for his mug and took a gulp of tea. “I put the money into a fund,” he said.
“Just a moment — you were the fund?” said Ava.
“Yes, I had my fund. But I put all the money I collected into another one — a bigger one. At least I thought it was a bigger one.”
“What was its name?”
“Surabaya Fidelity Security.”
“Never heard of it.”
“Why would you?” he said, the tears returning to his eyes.
Ava thought about what Joey Lac had said, about Lam not being the kind of man to steal or lie. Less than five minutes into her conversation with him she already had the same impression. “Could you start at the beginning?” she asked.
He sipped his tea. “I have — I had a friend named Fred Purslow. We worked for the same accounting firm after school, and even after we went our separate ways we kept in touch. I started my own accounting business, dealing mainly with Vietnamese clients, and he went into banking.”
“Bank Linno?”
He didn’t seem surprised by the question. “Yeah, that’s where he ended up.”
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to disrupt your train of thought.”
“That’s not hard these days . . . Anyway, about three years ago one of my clients, who owns a grocery store, asked me if I could help him with a problem concerning cash. He had been accumulating it illegally and wanted to find a way he could use it without drawing the attention of Revenue Canada or the police or whatever. I couldn’t think of any way of doing that and told him so. A few weeks later I was having dinner with Fred and explained the situation to him. He didn’t say anything to me right away, but the next day he called and asked to meet me. Over lunch he told me about a fund he administered at the bank. It was private, like everything that bank did, but he thought if he talked to his bosses, they might agree to let me participate.”
“Did you run a check on the fund?”
“It was private, not registered, but backed by the bank, Fred said.”
“And he was your friend, and you believed him,” Ava said.
Lam closed his eyes. “Yes, I believed him.”
“So what was special about this fund?”
“Fred told me it would provide a guaranteed return of twelve percent annually. And he told me I could put all the cash I wanted into it, no questions asked. All I had to do was set up a company that I could use to funnel the money in and out of.”
“Emerald Lion?”
“Yeah.”
“Mr. Lam, would you mind if I took some notes?” she asked, realizing this was getting complicated.
His teeth gnawed at his lower lip as he nodded at her.
She opened her pad and uncapped her pen. “Are you telling me that Emerald Lion was not actually a fund — was never a fund — that it was in reality just an incorporated company?”