and eat a few of the pastries heaped on a silver platter in the middle of the board table before anyone else showed up. The board meeting started promptly at nine-thirty.
Directors from outside the ranks of management are generally trivial appendages on any board. Most outside directors are just semiretired old geezers — or college professors, which most people think are more or less the same thing — who have nothing much better to do than show up for meetings a few times a year. We are seldom expected to do anything other than keep our mouths shut, stay awake, and vote the way the company’s management tells us to vote.
After the board sat through a seemingly endless Power Point presentation about a Mekong River hydroelectric project that of course no one understood, we listened to a droning recitation on the future of the shrimp industry in Cambodia that was so dull I think one director may have passed away during it without anyone noticing. We dutifully voted to approve both projects and management rewarded me for my support with a small retainer to review the shrimp farm’s financial structure.
The meeting ended just after twelve and a light lunch was served in the boardroom. I made small talk with some of the other directors and picked at the buffet until a decent interval had passed, then I said my goodbyes and slipped away. Crossing Des Voeux Road, I walked through the Landmark, a ritzy shopping mall that joined the bases of two of Central’s principal office towers, and emerged on Queen’s Road. Across the street, just where Central began to slope sharply up toward the Peak, I spotted Duddell Street.
It was narrow and so steep that the sidewalks were actually flights of stained concrete steps. I watched the street numbers carefully as I climbed and all the way at the end of the street I finally located the address that the book had for the Asian Bank of Commerce. It was an altogether unexceptional office building of no more than a dozen floors faced with black-streaked brick that had probably once been yellow. An elderly Chinese man wearing a dirty undershirt and baggy gray trousers sat slumped on a folding metal chair next to the glass and metal entry door. He snorted and spat as I passed, but I didn’t take it personally.
Inside the building the small lobby was dim and smelled faintly of urine. I examined the directory between the elevators and, sure enough, found a listing for the Asian Bank of Commerce on the ninth floor.
When I got out of the elevator, I saw only three offices on that floor and none of them looked much like a bank. One was a dentist’s office, one seemed to be a sweatshop with an Indian tailor hovering hopefully just inside the open door, and the third was something called Hong Kong Directors Limited. When I spotted the large board at the end of the corridor with columns of small wooden signs hanging from brass hooks, I realized that Hong Kong Directors was the place I was looking for after all.
Hong Kong Directors was apparently a corporate services office, one of dozens scattered around Hong Kong that catered to foreign companies too small or too unimportant to have local offices of their own, but who nevertheless needed a formal address in Hong Kong. Corporate services companies existed all over the world, but they were most in demand in places like Hong Kong, Luxembourg, and the Cayman Islands where countless thousands of companies register themselves as residents for the purpose of minimizing taxes or maintaining confidentiality while conducting their real business elsewhere. Companies fronted by corporate services providers were often referred to as “brass plate companies” since very little evidence of their existence could be found other than the brass plate generally hung somewhere to identify the provider as the legally registered address of its clients. Hong Kong Directors must have been operating in the low end of the market. Its plates were wood.
I realized immediately that my chances of finding out anything about the Asian Bank of Commerce from Hong Kong Directors were pretty slim. No corporate service company would give out any information about a company registered with it other than whatever local law required, and in Hong Kong that wasn’t much.
So, expecting very little, I opened the door and went inside. Very little was exactly what I found.
The reception area was small. It appeared that Hong Kong Directors didn’t receive very many visitors. Three folding metal chairs were lined up along the wall to the left and opposite them was a wooden desk piled high with stacks of paper. A young Chinese girl slumped over the desk. She had badly permed hair, skin blotched with acne scars, and a dimple in her chin deep enough to hide Easter eggs. Perhaps she had a great personality, loved small children, and would make a wonderful wife for someone, but somehow I doubted it. I got the feeling her plainness was more than skin deep.
The girl ignored me as long as she possibly could, but I stood my ground and waited her out. Eventually she squinted up at me through a pair of glasses with lenses that looked like the bottoms of Coke bottles.
“You wait,” she said, and pointed to the chairs along the wall.
“I only have one quick question.”
“You wait,” she repeated emphatically, and started making small brushing movements with her right hand, the sort you would use to shoo a cat away.
I walked over to one of the straight chairs and sat down, folding my arms and fixing the girl with a stare I hoped was unsettling. Apparently it wasn’t. She took her time shuffling through the stacks of files in front of her and never even looked at me. Eventually she extracted a page from a file and for some reason held it up to the light as if she was trying to see through it. Hoping she was about to glance my way again at least, I gave her my warmest smile and crinkled my eyes in a way I thought emphasized what an honest, open fellow I was, but I was wasting my time. The girl lowered the paper, returned it to the file without a glance at me, and went back to plowing slowly through the rest of the folders.
Eventually she ran out of things to pretend to do and peered over at me. “What you want?”
“I have a question about one of the companies registered with you: the Asian Bank of Commerce.”
The girl looked puzzled, as if the request was a novel one. Then she made an odd noise. “Whaaaa…”
“I just need some general information about the company,” I went on quickly, hoping for the best. “Who its directors are, where it’s organized, that short of thing.”
“No information,” the girl snapped. She looked down and pulled another stack of files toward her.
“For Christ’s sake,” I muttered as I stood up and took a step toward her desk, “all I want to know is what’s in the public filings. The company is licensed as a bank in Hong Kong and the registration information is public. I’m not asking you for the damned books.”
The girl spun around in her swivel chair so hard that I thought she was about to corkscrew herself right through the floor. Reaching into a cabinet behind her, she flipped through several piles of paper and then extracted a single sheet. She spun back around and wordlessly thrust it out toward me.
I took the sheet and started to return to my chair to read it, but I needn’t have bothered. There was nothing on it except the name Asian Bank of Commerce, the address of the building where I was, and one other sentence: “Contact Mr. Wang at Hong Kong Directors during business hours.”
I turned back to the girl, laid the sheet back on her desk, and tried my hard stare again.
“I would like to know who the directors are.”
“No information,” she repeated without looking up.
“Is Mr. Wang here?”
“Not here.”
“When will he be in?”
“Not here.”
I took a business card out of my wallet and laid it on the desk in front of the girl.
“When Mr. Wang comes in, would you please-”
The girl ignored my card. Instead, she jerked up the telephone receiver, stabbed at a button, and began to bark something into the receiver in rapid-fire Cantonese, rotating her chair until her back was to me.
I’d had enough. I left.
I stood out in the corridor for a moment wondering if I should have tried to push the girl a little rather than give up so easily. Maybe I could at least have found a way to irritate her enough to force Mr. Wang to make an appearance. My eyes wandered over the rows of wooden signs hanging on the wall while I considered the possibilities, but then I noticed something that suddenly caused me to forget all about the dimple with ears.
Down near the bottom of the second column of signs, stuck among the generic names that sounded exactly like the empty corporate shells they were, was a company name I recognized immediately: Cambodian Prawn Ventures Limited. That was the company vehicle Southeast Asian Investments was using for the shrimp farm investment we had just been discussing at the board meeting, the very company whose financial structure I had just been hired to review.
That was quite a coincidence, I reflected.
