UNKNOWN TO SIMMO, HE HAD BEEN followed to Panama, there he had been seen boarding the flight to Madrid. At first he had been lost, then, 24 hours later, his pursuers picked up his trail again.
It took some time, cross referencing information, before his car rental turned up, but what he did over the following 48 hours was a blank. Spain was a big place, normally thronging with millions of tourists. Luckily, thanks to the pandemic, hotel occupation rates had fallen 70%, which made the task of finding him a little easier and the rental was traced to San Sebastian. A speeding ticket had been forwarded to the rental company by the local police after Simmo was clocked at over 60 km/h in the downtown area of the city after he left Kennedy and his friends for his return flight from Madrid.
From there it was easy, after checking guest records at all the hotels, registered for payment of tourist tax, he was traced to the Hotel de Londres, where he had spent two nights in one of their most expensive rooms.
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Wallace, having no legal training, was a middleman. On the one side he had his Russian friends with their links to the Caribbean and South America, on the other was Simmonds, who undertook the legal formalities setting up offshore companies and bank accounts with links into mainstream banking in the City of London and its offshore bases.
One of those offshore banks was Malcolm Smeaton’s Anglo-Dutch Commonwealth Bank, a successful private bank that catered for high-net-worth clients, 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.
Smeaton’s Caribbean based bank had struggled in the immediate aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and was bailed out when Francis Wang a Chinese businessman appeared and saved it from collapse. Then when Wang’s business interests in Venezuela turned sour, Pat Kennedy stepped in and snapped up his share in the bank. Business picked up again as Pat recentered the bank’s business on the growing number of high-net-worth individuals. Inequality in the post financial crisis decade exploded especially after Donald Trump was elected and as Big Tech surfed a new wave.
It was Wallace who had introduced Simmo to the Ambergris development, the idea of a politically connected Belize promoter. Financially it was a sound investment, in spite of the fat kickbacks.
In nearby Mexico, Cancun had become very popular with Russian tourists after Aeroflot opened a service of direct flights from Moscow. It was an attractive alternative to Cuba for Muscovites who had grown tired of Havana’s spartan comforts.
It was like that Igor Vishnevsky, a former high level executive of VTB, a state owned Russian Bank, arrived in Cancun, where he set about establishing a conduit to hide money defrauded from commodity exporters, Russia’s largest mining and metallurgical companies. It was not long before he developed an interest in nearby Belize, a friendly offshore platform where he could channel money via an easy to set up International Business Company (IBC), described by Arkady Demitriev's friend Gordon Wallace as ‘one of the most effective corporations, a tool used by individuals and corporations around the world to plan their taxes and manage assets’.
Russian diplomatic interests in Belize were represented by Mexico, and Demitriev, a GRU agent based in Cancun, coordinated certain of Moscow's covert operations in the region and in particular those relating to British and former British Territories.
One of Demitriev’s tasks was to channel funds through Belize to finance the next phase of the Brexit disinformation campaign in London, assisted by Wallace, who managed various shell companies and their bank accounts set up for that purpose in a number of Caribbean offshore tax havens.
More recently the Russians were backing antivaxer groups and conspirationalists in their war to undermine political and social cohesion in their geopolitical war against Western democracies to gain strategic goals for the Kremlin’s authoritarian occupant.
It had been a good business for Wallace, a longtime fellow traveller, who had led a very comfortably life style thanks to commissions he deducted from the accounts he managed for the various parties, which he deftly moved through a cascade of Caribbean banks.
Wallace had another lucrative sideline, golden passports, specifically Dominican. The Commonwealth of Dominica, not to be confused with the Dominican Republic, was an island state situated between the French Caribbean islands of Martinique and Guadalupe. It was for that reason Demitriev had introduced Vishnevsky to Wallace, with the Russian agreeing to invest in the Ambergris project, in exchange for a Dominican passports for himself and his friends, and setting aside a beachfront unit for the Dominican politico who would facilitate the procedure.
Wallace had used a classic money laundering arrangement for Oleg Sedov’s funds which were transferred by Vishnevsky from a Cyprus bank via Malcolm Smeaton’s Anglo-Dutch Commonwealth Bank on behalf of a British Virgin Islands company set up by Simmonds law firm.
Everything went smoothly until tourist arrivals suddenly came to a halt and sales dried up before he had time to realise what was happening. No one could have foreseen the pandemic, especially in laid-back Belize, everyone was caught in the same trap, including Wallace and his friends, whose scheme began to unravel faster than they could think. Sedov and his pals wanted their money back, but Wallace and his local friends stalled, it wasn’t so easy, and in any case they were in too deep.
The Russians were not about to be screwed by a bunch of pot smoking Rastas, they wanted the names of the banks, account numbers and codes. Unfortunately Demitriev’s partners in crime, Mexican gangsters, had used heavy handed methods to persuade Wallace to hand over the details, waterboarding him in the pool at his villa, drowning him in the process.
It was very bad news for Demitriev, on top of that Vishnevsky became threatening, one because the money that was not his had disappeared and two the golden passports for Sedov and his friends were not forthcoming.
Sedov had no choice but to deal with the problems, he couldn’t have his operations compromised by Vishnevsky and ordered Demitriev to clean up the mess.
The first was Simmonds, who he’d learnt was charged with looking after Wallace’s estate, he would have to be dealt with, though not before he explained what he had been doing or hiding in Europe.