Nine Lives - Danielle Steel Page 0,67
to prison for it?” she asked, worried. She was in love with him, but wanted to steer clear if he was a flat-out criminal, instead of a guy who was too clever, and trying to avoid U.S. taxes to the degree he could. He had obviously stepped over that line, innocently or not.
“Technically, he could go to prison, but I doubt that they’d do that to him. They’d rather negotiate with him to repatriate some of what he has in shelters in offshore tax havens, which he probably won’t do if they put him in jail anyway. And he can stay out of the country, in other countries that won’t extradite him. There are a number of them. The IRS would probably prefer to play ball with him, if he will, even if they lose some money on it. He’s right about that too. He clearly knows what he’s doing. This is a major-league game. You have to be very smart and have good nerves for it.”
“He doesn’t even sound worried.”
“Guys like him are willing to take the risk. I couldn’t sleep at night if I had the IRS breathing down my neck, but he probably assessed the risk a long time ago, and will push it as far as he can. And they won’t go after you, Mrs. Mackenzie, if you’re concerned about that. This is all about him. I’m sure your tax records are clean. And you’re not married to him. You have no vulnerability.”
“My records are squeaky clean,” she said, somewhat relieved by what the lawyer said.
“Then you have nothing to worry about,” he reassured her. But she was still worried about the mess Paul was in.
She spoke to Aden that night and reassured him. “I’ve spoken to Paul, my own lawyer, and a tax expert. It’s over my head, but apparently this is a battle between Paul and the IRS about how his foreign corporations and investments are set up, and the IRS wanting to discredit some of it to get more taxes from him. Supposedly, it’ll wind up a negotiation and some kind of settlement in the end. No one seems to believe he’ll go to prison. Paul admits that he and his tax lawyers have been very aggressive about protecting him, too much so, so now they have to justify it to the IRS. He’s not upset by it, and said he expected it sooner or later.”
“He must be a very smart guy,” Aden said, full of admiration for him, which Maggie wasn’t thrilled about. Aden hadn’t even met him, but was prepared to forgive anything he’d done, and believed that he was right.
“It sounds like a nightmare to me. The British authorities seized his penthouse and it sounds like he’s going to lose it.”
“Will he lose the boat?” Aden sounded disappointed about that.
“Apparently not. He says it can’t be touched. But still, even if he saved a bunch of money on taxes, this isn’t an ideal way to do it, not to this extreme.” But it was the way he did everything. He was an exciting person, but also a fearless one, which made him dangerous to himself, if nothing else.
“I’m glad he’s going to be okay. The article in the Times made it sound a lot worse,” Aden said, relieved.
“Well, he’s not worried, so I wanted to let you know,” she said.
“When are you going to see him again?” he asked her.
“I don’t know. Maybe soon. In Paris. I’m figuring it out and deciding now.” She didn’t tell him Paul was going to Paris so he couldn’t be extradited to the U.S. and possibly put in jail, even temporarily. She’d never known anyone who had gone to jail for any reason. She knew that as an accountant, and very conservative in his views, Brad would have been horrified by how Paul did business and the risks he took, and would have wanted no part of it. But Brad was part of a different world. Paul lived on top of Mount Everest somewhere, and played life by different rules. Paul was not a criminal, it turned out, if everything he said was true, but he didn’t live by the book either, and Maggie always had. Everything about Paul’s life was new to her, and so was he. He was no longer the boy she knew at seventeen by any means. She believed him now, but she wasn’t sure if she could live that way too, or if she wanted to.
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