Dead Heat - By Dick Francis & Felix Francis Page 0,116
fifteen hundred or so horses sold at that sale were from Horse Imports Ltd. And every single one of them was female, either a mare or a filly. And that couldn’t be a coincidence.
That sale was just one of eleven similar sales held each year at Newmarket. There were also many major bloodstock auctions at Doncaster, and at Fairyhouse and Kill in Ireland, not to mention many others around the world. Then there were the horses sold privately. The horse-selling business worldwide was enormous. Lots and lots of jumbo-jetfuls, each one producing millions.
As Toby had studied the catalogue, Caroline and I had sat in front of his computer screen and ran searches on Horse Imports Ltd on the Companies House website. It was a British subsidiary of a Dutch company. It had an annual turnover that ran into tens of millions, but it seemed to have liabilities to its parent company equal to its gross profit, and so it showed no net profit, and hence paid no UK tax. I didn’t know how many horses it sold each year but, if they were all as reasonably priced as Toby had said, there must have been thousands of them. I wondered if they all had a uterus, and whether they had all arrived in the UK with drug-filled metal balls. And those were just the British-bound horses. I knew he also sold horses in the United States and I suspected he did too in his native Russia, if only to his polo club. Where else? I wondered. Would there be enough female horses in the whole of South America?
I tried to use the computer to trace the parent company into the Dutch system but without any success. I was fairly confident that the Dutch company would, itself, prove to have a parent company, and so on. I suspected that the overall parent, the matriarch company at the top of the tree, would turn out to have a Dutch Antilles base, to be an offshore entity where such considerations as corporation taxes were not a worry.
Bernard had made an interesting little speech before he had taken himself back to London. ‘One of the major problems for drug dealers,’ he had said, ‘is what to do with the vast amounts of cash generated by the trade. Nowadays governments have wised up and put anti-money-laundering measures in place. You know how difficult it is now to open a bank account? Well, that’s because the banks are required to prove not only who you are but that funds in your accounts are come by in a legal and tax-reported fashion. These days you can’t buy things with cash, not really expensive things like cars and houses. Even bookmakers won’t take a large bet in cash any more, and they certainly won’t pay you out in cash if you win. It has to be by bank transfer or credit card. So cash is a problem. It’s all right if it’s only a few hundred or even a few thousand; that’s easy to spend. But millions in cash? You can’t just buy your luxury Mediterranean yacht with suitcases full of cash. The yacht seller won’t take it, because he has the same problem.’
‘Can’t you take the suitcases of cash into the Cayman Islands or somewhere and put it in a bank?’ I had asked.
‘No chance,’ he’d replied. ‘It’s now more difficult to open a bank account in the Cayman Islands than it is here. They are subject to all sorts of regulations laid down by both the United States and the European Union.’
‘But I thought they were an offshore centre for saving tax? What have the US and Europe got to do with it?’
‘If the offshore centres don’t comply with the rules, the US won’t allow its citizens to go there. It would be like Cuba,’ he had gone on. ‘And the Cayman Islands rely on the tourism industry to survive, and nearly all their tourists come from the United States, mostly on cruise ships.’
I sat playing with the computer and thinking about how I would deal with millions of pounds in cash if I had been Mr Komarov.
‘Suppose,’ I said to Caroline, ‘he sends the cash back to South America along with the empty balls. Customs don’t care about cash leaving. They’re too busy looking out for drugs arriving.’
‘So,’ she said, ‘what good would that do? Bernard said you can’t transfer large amounts from South America to banks over here without having to prove first it’s