A Week in December by Sebastian Faulks Page A

opportunity.
    To begin with, until they found their feet, they did some easy deals in his old bank speciality: debt. This seemed an obvious way of 'getting our eye in', as Godley put it; there was the further attraction to Veals that bank debt was not regulated. You could pass on market-sensitive information without a problem; what would have got you three years in prison for insider trading if you dealt in equities was quite permissible when discussing bank debt, and here was Veals's preferred position: the kosher edge.
    An early coup came when he noticed that one of the Eastern European countries was owed PS30 million by a former French African colony. Veals discovered that the Slavs expected little or no return on what they'd rashly lent the Africans and they were delighted to get the whole debt off their hands to Veals in return for PS5 million.
    When the Jubilee 2000 movement for the cancellation of debt persuaded the G7 countries to write off the African debt, Veals at once sued the African government in the London High Court for repayment of the PS25 million shortfall. The judge expressed distaste at the action, but said his hands were tied by law. Veals owned the bonds; the Africans were obliged to reroute the G7 refund straight into Veals's recently opened private Allied Royal bank account in Victoria Street, London SW1. It was a happy result for High Level Capital in its infant days.
    There was a large industry in London which existed to exploit the 'rights' of junior debtors in companies on their deathbed: it involved taking extreme legal positions of doubtful morality. Veals viewed it as a boring and mechanical trade, with irritating lawyers' fees, but admitted it was a dependable revenue earner; it was, as Steve Godley put it, 'a club we need to have in our bag. A handy seven iron.'
    In New York, Veals had given Marc Bezamain carte blanche to do such trades whenever he saw fit. Veals knew that Bezamain had the kosher edge in this area because of his friendship with people in the ratings agencies. If a troubled company's bonds were downgraded, some mutual funds were obliged to shed them for what Bezamain called 'non-economic' reasons: pensioners' representatives could be just too fussy - the bonds hadn't lost any real value.
    Bezamain had come into Veals's orbit in New York, via Paris and a grande ecole or two, but originally from a poor village near Cahors in south-west France. His parents were smallholders - 'fucking peasants', as Veals put it to him at interview: his aunt worked stuffing grain down the throat of geese in an industrial foie gras plant. But the young man was good. He was very strong on risk limitation; he had a rustic smallholder's caution, and Veals and Godley both privately believed he kept his annual bonus ($8 million this January) in cash beneath the mattress.
    To John Veals the staffing of High Level Capital was a matter of frantic delicacy, and the most valuable to him were the consultants. They included two East Europeans, whose utilities he had bled white on behalf of his bank in New York in the course of their post-Communist denationalisations. They had gone from being treasurers and chief financial officers to being politicians: finance ministers for their respective governments. Their days of being 'entertained' by Veals and Godley with the limitless expense account of the bank in New York had given the men a taste for the exotic which they couldn't fund themselves. Veals and Godley had made available a few 'founder shares' in High Level, then hired them as research specialists on 'economic trends'. Their job was to deliver inside information on their respective countries; they were paid a retainer, but also on results that accrued from that information.
    In the course of the African debt venture, Veals had addressed himself to the British Embassy, where the commercial attache, a well-spoken young man called Martin Ryman, who was bored with making car-parking arrangements for visiting