‘Fine, we can arrange that,’ said Michel, ‘but we will have to monitor your condition on a permanent basis.’ ‘That can be managed.’ ‘Blood tests and things like that, two or three times a month, at least,’ added Henri. ‘Good.’ ‘Do you have any er ... um … capsules ready?’ ‘No, but they can be prepared without too much difficulty.’ A few days later Henri personally delivered a month’s supply of capsules to the villa. He also informed Pat they would have an independent medical laboratory in Beaulieu take blood samples once a week for analysis and Pat should return to Sophia Antipolis for a full check-up in the event of a problem and at the latest after one month. Pat agreed to ask Robert McGoldrick to send them his MRI scans and other data for comparative analysis to evaluate progress, that is if there was any evidence of the Galenus formulation, as they called it, on Pat’s wellbeing. ‘Normally with this kind of herbal medicine the only risk is allergy, so if you have a reaction call me at one Pat,’ Henri told him. Robert McGoldrick worked closely with LifeGen, in fact it was he who had proposed Pat invest in longevity which was linked to his own field of research, and more especially that related to life extending enzymes such as RNA polymerase III, a complex process of transcription present in the cells of almost all animal species, including humans.
LifeGen was about to undertake clinical trials on Rhesus monkeys with a compound made up of a cocktail of different molecules including Galenus1, which had demonstrated, for as yet unexplained reasons, greater benefits than individual substances such as NDGA, which they hope would be a first step in greater longevity. Ageing, or senescence, was the main cause of disease, as Steve Swarz had demonstrated through his work on worms, his nematode, Caenorhabditis elegans, that microscopic creature which in spite of its size possessed all the physiological properties of an animal. Its use to study the ageing process had been developed thanks to numerous mutations that had been linked to the rate of senescence, with some mutants living up to 10-times longer than naturally occurring worms.
CHAPTER 16 SEDOV AND HIS POWERFUL FRIENDS had great plans. Their idea was to build a safe haven in London for the day when Putin's Russia paid the price for its leader's dreams of grandeur, a fate that eventually befell all authoritarian states. Though they were not very imaginative they were observant, carefully watching the very rich, fellow countrymen and other property tycoons who had invested big in London. It was amazing how the British upper classes were naïve, corrupt was perhaps a better word, like the Czar, dancing whilst the revolutionaries plotted against him. Sedov was a student of history, Russian history, and had no desire to end up in Lubyanka, once described as the tallest building in Moscow, since Siberia could be seen from its basement. A reference to ambitious men like Sedov was the president of the United Arab Emirates, Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who it was reported owned around eight billion dollars of real estate in London's Mayfair, Knightsbridge and Kensington districts. Properties owned by a web of shell companies in offshore havens set up by anonymous lawyers, much better paid than the sadly unlamented Simmo, because Khalifa could count on the complicity of the British establishment, as for Sedov and his friends they were newcomers, still feeling their way around the City and its Caribbean laundromat.
Khalifa had been behind some of London’s most obscene London property deals, paying wild prices with unlimited petrodollars for ultra prime properties, many of which had stood empty for years. Encouraged by Boris Johnson, who as Mayor of London had flown to Kuala Lumpur in 2014 to promote London’s Battersea power station redevelopment, London had been transformed into the Wild West of the global property market. At the time of Johnson’s visit, Malaysia’s ruling prime minister was Najib Razak, now in prison after the scandal surrounding the country’s state development fund 1MDB from which billions of dollars had been embezzled, charged with corruption on a huge scale. He had been found blatantly guilty of diverting billions of dollars out of Malaysian public funds into his own and his associates’ pockets. Nearly two billion dollars were invested by Malaysian sovereign funds in the huge Battersea Power Station luxury development. Razak’s trial uncovered a trail of corruption that repeatedly led to the City of London, a central hub in the movement of dirty money, which enjoyed the complaisance of British politicians and members of the British Establishment.
CHAPTER 17 CHRIS EVESHAM WAS KEEPING HIS head low, it was a professional habit. He was a chartered accountant and had his office in a nice property he owned, situated in the Fort George neighborhood, on the north side of the Swing Bridge, the best neighborhood in Belize City, with its fine houses and mansions, though not all were in good repair. The property stood on Cork Street, where he employed a couple of clerks and a secretary. Chris had become worried, two of his clients were suddenly not answering his calls. The first was George Wallace, for him the explanation was easy, he was found dead floating face down in the pool at his place, a large villa that lay on the edge of the forest, between the Rio Bravo Conservation Area and the Crooked Tree Wildlife Sanctuary. The second and more important was Barry Simmonds of Simmonds & Young, a law firm that managed many of his clients' legal matters. Simmo had simply disappeared, vanished, leaving no trace. Now, it was not that Eversham ran any physical risk in Belize City, provided of course he did not cross Haulover Creek at the south end of the Swing Bridge, a district that was one of the city’s most dangerous areas, especially after dark. The simple reason for that was he worked from his office in London, in a property he owned on Rochester Row in Westminster, to which he commuted, when necessary, from his home in Cheam, South London, travelling into Victoria Station on the suburban line. His business was not necessarily tax avoidance, but tax evasion, which demanded a certain confidentiality and that implied being elusive with most
of his work being effected online, except for rare meetings with his more important clients. Most of his clients were property firms and many of them overseas in any one of the UK's Overseas Territories. Few of their managers ever visited Belize, which was one of its advantages, mostly to do with its reputation for being unsafe, which it often was. He had chosen Belize many years back when it became independent and property in the Fort George area, the more affluent section of the city, was going for a song. He had imagined it would develop like the British Caribbean islands. It never happened. On the other hand it had in recent years become a lesser known tax haven when its government realised there was little other alternative to propping up its crumbling economy. Things improved and the neighborhood underwent many changes with the construction of the Radisson Hotel, the Belize Tourism Village and the arrival of a modest flow of tourists. His clients came from the Middle East, Latin America and the various states that had formed the defunct Soviet Union. They owned shell companies and offshore bank accounts set up by Simmonds into which flowed cash via Cyprus, Israel and Malta, which was invested in Caribbean real estate, including hotels and condos, from which rents were received, management fees charged, renovation and maintenance work invoiced, and which were finally sold to City based investment funds with the laundered proceeds invested in London property owned by nebulous offshore companies the accounts of which were managed by Evesham. Chris Evesham, from an accountant’s point of view, could not blame the collapse of the Ambergris tourist complex on the promoters. The pandemic had been unforeseeable. When the sales ground to a halt, due to the absence of potential buyers and tourists, down payments dried up, banks got cold feet and pulled loans, construction firms abandoned the site, work stopped
leaving the clubhouse foundations and the first condos half built alongside the now overgrown golf course, the local real estate developer went belly up and the Russian investors wanted their money back bystryy! The Russian investors in question, certain highly placed individuals, like Andrei Rublev’s friends, represented by Oleg Sedov—a member of the state security apparatus, which included the GRU and the FSB, were known for their use of criminal networks as instruments of pressure and political influence. What surprised Evesham was the reaction of the Russians, who he believed were directly or indirectly responsible for Wallace's death and Simmonds’ disappearance. Their losses at Ambergris under normal circumstances were far from catastrophic, except for Simmonds who had put his retirement fund into the project. Evesham figured it was perhaps the first of the dominoes to fall, especially if pandemic intensified and the Russians’ other investments across the Caribbean stalled. He suspected there was more going on than met the eye at VTB in Moscow when he learnt the body of Igor Vishnevsky had been found on the beach near the abandoned construction site at Ambergris Caye on the San Pedro Peninsula. He knew certain of the companies for which he managed the accounts were owned by individuals linked to VTB and its global network, which the bank boasted was a system unique to the Russian banking industry, enabling the group to facilitate international partnerships and promote Russian investors expansion into global markets. He spoke with Malcolm Smeaton’s Anglo-Dutch Commonwealth Bank, a successful private bank that catered for high-net-worth clients, at Roseau on
the Island of Dominica, most of whom sought the secrecy afforded by such banks specialized in total discretion, few questions, the kind of legendary service once offered by tight-lipped Swiss banks. Wallace had used a classic money laundering arrangement for Oleg Sedov’s funds which were transferred by Vishnevsky from a Cyprus bank via the Anglo-Dutch Commonwealth Bank on behalf of a British Virgin Islands company set up by Simmonds’ law firm. Smeaton informed him that in spite of the economic downturn vast sums of money were pouring into banks like his as the rich rushed to secure their wealth. However, many of the real estate development businesses and property holdings that had accounts with his bank were in trouble as the tourist sector was in a state of near collapse as revenues plunged by over 70%. The failure of their Caribbean venture would not be good for VTB's image, especially if it was linked to corruption, embezzlement and murder.
CHAPTER 18 OLEG SEDOV WAS MAD FOR SEVERAL reasons, first because he had trusted the VTB bank, which was controlled by the Russian Federal Agency for State Property Management, secondly because they had recommended Vishnevsky. On their advice important people had invested in the Caribbean on his recommendations, and any backlash would directly affect Sedov. He needed a scape goat, Vishnevsky had already been taken care of, now it was the turn of the VTB's Real Estate investment manager, Anton Nazarov, who had recommended him. Using well tested KGB methods Sedov needed to deflect responsibility and cover his links to the business. Anton Nazarov left the gleaming Federation West Tower, a complex of two towers, the West with its 63 stories and the East 97 stories, the home of the VTB Bank. It stood amongst the cluster of proud glass towers in middle of the Moscow International Business Center situated in the Presnensky District overlooking the Moskva River. He headed for the Vystavochnaya metro station where he took the line to Arbatskaja. It was already past seven, he had been trying to untangle the investments that had been caught up in the pandemic and he was late for a meeting with his girl friend at a restaurant off ulitsa Arbat.
He hurried out of the metro, the evening was fine, he was feeling better, looking forward to his evening, it was Annika’s birthday, he could forget all his worries for a few hours. At forty-five, Anton was dynamic and his career was on the road to great things, that is until the Black Swan appeared on the horizon in the form of a virus. He had risen to manager of investments in the Caribbean thanks to the favours he had rendered to influential string pullers in the Kremlin. Now he
was struggling to save what he could as a chain reaction of events made the development projects they had invested in worthless. He was frightened by Vishnevsky’s fate. Turning onto a side street he saw the window of the restaurant a little further along, he glanced at his watch, he was about ten minutes late. At that moment, from the shadow on a doorway, a form emerged, before Anton knew what had happened he hit the stone slabs of the sidewalk, dead, two shots to the head from a silenced 8mm Makarov PB, another in the heart as he lay on the ground. The killer turned and calmly headed out onto the Arbat where he faded into the evening crowd. He was a hired hitman, one of the vory, a Chechen, the most forbidding settlers of commercial grievances. Sedov wanted a debt settled, Sedov called a Chechen.
CHAPTER 19 DAVID CAMERON, IN REPLY TO Vladimir Putin’s annexation of the Crimea, had called his senior ministers to prepare the British riposte to the aggression. As his ministers hurried into 10, Downing Street, a sharp eyed photographer caught a shot of a briefing memo protruding from a document folder carried by one of the advisors. It stated that the government was against imposing economic sanctions on Russia, saying the UK ‘should not support for now trade sanctions or close London’s financial center to Russians'. The explanation was easy to understand since London was a vital hub for Russian investment. The question was what kind of investment and with what money? How much dirty money transited the City and British crown dependencies and overseas territories, all of which collectively formed the world’s biggest network of occult financial operations? British imperial power had been reborn in a new form, under a cloak of secrecy, a global network of financial power, centred on the City of London, serving a transnational elite, who ruled like medieval barons over their private fiefs, who offered their loyalty to the system in the form of capital, in exchange for the freedom to accumulate wealth and riches, protected from taxes, regulations, predatory politicians and confiscatory justice. The barons were Russian oligarchs, oil sheikhs, hedge fund managers, tech billionaires and banker's. At the top were the mega rich billionaires, like Jeff Bezos, Michael Dell, Ma Huateng, Jack Ma, Sergey Brin, Larry Ellison, Larry Page, Steve
Ballmer, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and Bill Gates, their combined wealth was nearly one trillion dollars, an increase in 250 billion dollars from the previous year, their god was Mammon. Trailing not far behind the top tier were the Russian oligarchs like Demitry Rybolovlev, German Khan, Roman Abramovich, Alisher Usmanov, Aleksey Mordashov and their friends collectively worth over 250 billion dollars. Then came the ultra rich, followed by the really rich, then the merely rich that some called tail end high-net-worth individuals. Whatever. In any case tailgating the mega rich billionaires was Pat Kennedy who’d built his fortune looking after all the others money. The bottom feeders were the would be rich, wannabes, risk takers, who put their ill gotten gains into projects like the Ambergris Golf Resort, funneling their stolen wealth into safe havens and investing for the longterm in real estate. In normal times such projects could go bust, in fact they often did, which wasn’t a problem, since in one way or another the money had been laundered via different stratagems, including inflated payments for various services, architects, promotional services and other fees to companies in London. In this way corrupt Russian officials laundered money, embezzled through fraudulent commodity trading, or the disposal of government assets valued way below market prices, transforming dirty rubles and dollars into clean capital.
APOLOGIES Not all ‘golden passports’ are bad. Pavel Durova, the Belarusian dissident, anti-Lukashenko activist and founder of the Telegraph app, holds a St Kitts and Nevis passport and lives in Dubai. His advice for staying young is to live alone. I hope you my reader will forgive me for my endless mistakes: grammar, spelling, syntax, facts and omissions. These I fear would take another lifetime to rectify, which I don’t have given my advancing years, that plus the fact I have so many other stories to tell and observations to make on our world. Perhaps one day Google and AI will find a way to remove this burden from story tellers, who like me are not sufficiently applied, as my headmaster once told me.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This book could not have been written without the data and information published on the Internet and in the world press collected over a period of years, starting in 2000, when I wrote Offshore Islands, and Pat Kennedy was launched on his initially precarious international career. I have trawled numerous British, Irish, US, Russian, French, Spanish, Chinese, Israeli, Colombian newspapers, news blogs and specialist Internet sites, and books (authors’ cited). And of course Wikipedia. During this period I have collected information during my visits to the USA, China, Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, India, Dubai, Thailand, Cambodia, Libya, Egypt, Kenya, Tanzania, Senegal, Mali, Morocco, Mexico, Colombia, Panama, Brazil, Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, the Philippines, the UK, Germany, Belgium, France, Spain and Italy. To this I have added my experience in other parts of the world, notably Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, Taiwan, Japan, Burma, Switzerland, Algeria, Russia, Scandinavia, the Baltic Countries, Poland, Hungary, the countries of ex-Yugoslavia, Greece, Turkey, Russia, Turkmenistan, Jordan, Syria, Israel, Egypt, the Caribbean, Central and South America. I present my thanks and excuses to all the willing and unwilling contributors to the information included in this book, I am not the first to tread in the footsteps of Jack London, using the information supplied to us from those who convey it. I have tried to verify all the facts, but this is an impossible task. In my humble opinion most data reflects real events and the opinions of the vast majority of persons affected, directly or indirectly, by the multiple events and crises that constitute our collective existence. This story is a serialised novel of events, real or not, where the fictitious characters are fictitious, and where the real characters, such as Vladimir
Putin, Nicolas Maduro, Donald Trump, Boris Johnson and Emanuel Macron, are real. The story of 2000, and its sequels in 2010-2012, 2013, 2015, 2017, 2018 and 2019, are recounted in my other tales. With my very sincere thanks to all contributors, direct and indirect, knowing and unknowing, willing and unwilling. John Francis Kinsella Paris, November 15, 2020
Other books by John Francis Kinsella on Obooko: Fiction Borneo Pulp Offshore Islands The Legacy of Solomon The Plan The Prism 2049 The Lost Forest Death of a Financier The Turning Point 2007-2008 The Collection A Redhead at the Pushkin The Last Ancestor Cornucopia A Weekend in Brussels The Cargo Club 100 Seconds to Midnight The Gilgamesh Project Book I The Codex
Non-fiction An Introduction to Early Twentieth Century Chinese Literature Translations Le Point de Non Retour The Sorrow of Europe The Temple of Solomon Jean Sibelius A biography Understanding Architecture L’île de l’ouest In the works A Biography of Patrick Wolfe (Fiction)
BOOK III The third part of The Gilgamesh Project will be published in December 2020. What are the effects on Pat Kennedy when he starts taking the Galenus capsules? Does Demitriev discover the Wallace Codex? Does Mike Watson find out who killed Vishnevsky?