The Dog by Joseph O'Neill Read Free Book Online

have never held myself out as professionally competent in the realm of financial scrutiny. I pointed this out to Eddie right at the beginning. He did that thing of waving away an imaginary flying pest and said, “We’ve got experts to take care of all that. What we don’t have is someone we can trust. That’s where you come in—as our
homme de confiance
.” This brings me to my second tool: I am the General Expenditure Trustee of the so-called General Expenditure Accounts (GEAs). The GEAs are trust accounts held in the name of an Isle of Man trust company, Batros Trust Company Ltd. Monies funnel into the GEAs from all parts of the Batros Group, and the GEAs serve as a reservoir of money for the “personal use” (per the relevant trust power) of Batros “Family Members.” (“Family Member” means Eddie or Sandro or their father, Georges. Their wives and children are not “Family Members.”) If the trust powers are the dam, I’m the dam keeper: I am not empowered to authorize a GEA payment requested by a Family Member without the agreement of at least one other Family Member. In practice, this means that Georges and Eddie can withdraw as much as they want, because each has informed me that he agrees in advance to all GEA payments requested by the other; whereas Sandro, if and when he wishes to take out money, must go through the process of getting the permission of his father or his younger brother. In view of Sandro’s history of profligacy and unsuccessful gambling, this process can be complex.
    (Let me say this: I am of course aware of the technical risk of money laundering and/or tax evasion. The Isle of Man trust company is a red flag. Because I have no way to assess the risk, I have sought and received written assurances from each Family Member that to the best of his knowledge all sums credited to the GEAs have been lawfully gained and that all movementsof money in and out of the GEAs have a lawful purpose and are free from any taint of illegality.)
    There is a very high volume of requests for GEA money transfers, not least because the term “personal use” is very broad and is to be construed, according to Batros custom, as encompassing personal use for a business transaction. The sensitivity and unavoidable complexity of Batros financial doings means that very often the form and/or function of a transfer is opaque or unexplained and involves collateral documents—deeds of trust, contracts, checks, licenses, and other legal instruments—which are themselves opaque, written in foreign languages, etc., and to which I must also put my name. This last obligation is, unfortunately, of my own making. My self-written contract stipulates that I, the Family Officer,
    shall execute such [documents]
as pertain to
an authorized transfer [italics mine]
    and I cannot argue in good faith that documents collateral or adjunctive to a GEA transfer don’t fall within the ambit of “pertain to.” A lot of the time I’m signing off on stuff that, to be perfectly honest, I barely, if at all, understand. I’ve made Eddie aware of this, too, and here again his response has been to laugh and tell me not to sweat it.
    It’s kind of Eddie to offer this reassurance, but mine is the inevitable fate of the overwhelmed fiduciary: inextinguishable boredom and fear of liability. To mitigate the latter problem, I am ordering customized stamps of disclaimer to use whenever I sign anything. The document in question will be stamped with a text delimiting the terms on which I lend my signature to it, the document. These stamps are still in the drafting stage. I am the draftsman, and I cannot say that I’m finding it easy: it is not my forte, as my father used to say. (“It would seem that reinsurance is no longer my forte,” he stated in 1982, whenhe was let go by Swiss Re and we left Zurich, where I was born and spent my first twelve years, and moved to Southbury, Connecticut, in the United States, that foreign country of my