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.