The Gilgamesh Project Book II: La Isla Bonita by John Francis Kinsella

‘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 well-
being.

‘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 Galenus-
1, 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 long-

term 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?