from Great Wall Antiques and Fine Art. Five had no payment instructions other than a net ten-day term request; cheques were mailed to the Kau U Fong Road address. The other fifteen specifically requested that the cheques be sent to Great Wall Antiques and Fine Art, care of the Kowloon Light Industrial Bank. An address was provided for the bank, along with Great Wall’s account number.
She checked her notes. The five cheques sent directly to the street address of Great Wall were for paintings Brian Torrence deemed genuine or possibly genuine. The fifteen cheques sent to the account at the Kowloon bank were for those Torrence was sure were forgeries. What was stranger was that the five cheques had been deposited into an account at the Hong Kong Shanghai Bank, which was where Kwong banked, according to Grace Chan’s audit records.
Was Kwong running two accounts? And if he was, why? Grace Chan had made it clear that she wouldn’t have tolerated it if he’d been trying to avoid taxes.
Ava phoned Uncle. “Do we know anyone at the Kowloon Light Industrial Bank?”
“Friends own most of the Kowloon Light Industrial Bank.”
“Then I need you to talk to them.”
“What do you want to know?”
“Great Wall Antiques and Fine Art. Who controlled the account? I need copies of all the activity going through the account over the past ten years.”
“I will see what I can do.”
“Thank you, Uncle.”
“You have that tone in your voice, the one you get when you have found something.”
“I’m easily excited,” she said.
“I will pretend I believe you,” he said. “What are you doing for dinner?”
“No plans.”
“There is a new Shanghai restaurant near the Peninsula that they say has the best stewed sea cucumber in Hong Kong.”
“My mother would be happy.”
“ Momentai.”
Ava was lying on the bed, closing her eyes for a few moments, when her cellphone rang. “Ava Lee.”
“Ms. Lee, I’m Henry Chew from Kowloon Light Industrial Bank.” Uncle’s guanxi never failed to impress her.
“Thank you for calling.”
“My pleasure,” he said. Ava could hear the nervousness in his voice. “I have an assistant trying to locate the documentation you want. We’ll send it to the hotel by courier when we have it. In the meantime, I’ve taken a look at the account. What do you want to know?”
“It was in the name of Great Wall Antiques and Fine Art?”
“Actually no, it was a DBA account. The account holder was a numbered company doing business as Great Wall.”
“Where was the company registered?”
“Liechtenstein.”
Shit, she thought. “A bit unusual, isn’t it, for a company registered there to open a Hong Kong bank account?”
“There was less scrutiny then, fewer concerns about money laundering and that kind of thing. As long as the company was a legal entity and as long as it was obeying Hong Kong law, opening a bank account wasn’t that difficult.”
“Who was the signing authority?”
“A Georges Brun.”
“Just one?”
“It appears that way.”
“What information do you have on him?”
“He has the same address as the numbered company, a phone number that I would guess is in Liechtenstein. The copies of his photo ID all have a Liechtenstein address.”
“Can you give me the phone number now and send copies of the photo ID with the other information?”
“Sure,” he said, and recited the phone number.
“The account is closed now?” Ava prodded.
“Dormant. It still has a minimum balance.”
“When was the last transaction?”
“More than two years ago.”
“How active an account was it?”
“Not very, although a lot of money certainly went through it.”
“Put a number to not very.”
“After the initial opening deposit, there were fifteen more. As for withdrawals, there were fifteen large wire transfers and two smaller ones.”
“You’re sending me copies of all those transactions?”
“We’re searching for them as we speak.”
“Who did the small wires go to?”
“I won’t know where any of them went until we see the wires.”
“I want to thank you for this,” Ava said. “You’ve been helpful.”
“Not a problem, except — can I assume you’ll try to contact Georges Brun and maybe the overseas bank?”
“You can.”
“You can’t mention that we gave you this information.”
“I won’t. And look, send the information to me as soon as you have it. Don’t wait until tomorrow.”
“Will do.”
She stared at the Liechtenstein phone number. Everything she knew about Liechtenstein told her that the number was probably the bank’s and that Brun was probably a bank employee. Assuming that was true, she tried to come up with a plausible excuse for calling that would get Georges Brun or whoever else was at the other end of the line to speak to her. She came up dry.
Frustrated with herself, she went online and began to research Liechtenstein banking and company registration regulations. Maybe I’m overthinking this, Ava thought. Maybe the country’s reputation as a haven for offshore accounts has been overstated.
Half an hour later she gave up. Incorporating a company in Liechtenstein was as easy as buying milk at a corner store in Canada. There were officially more than seventy thousand registered holding companies in a country with a population of thirty-five thousand. And there were more than two hundred private banks to service those companies. Their reputation for secrecy was second to none, although they frowned on money laundering and were prepared to work with foreign government authorities if any fraudulent activity was suspected. Ava had no government credentials she could wave at them, and there was no hint of money laundering.
She then began considering the idea that the phone number was an actual company’s, not the bank’s. If it was, there would be a real name attached to the number she had. What the hell, she thought, it’s worth a try.
She dialled the number and a woman answered in a language that sounded like German. “I’m sorry, I only speak English,” Ava said.
“Liechtenstein Private Estate Bank,” the woman said.
So much for that plan, Ava thought. “Georges Brun, please.”
“Who shall I say is calling?”
“Never mind,” Ava said, and hung up.
She had no one else related to this case to talk to, or rather no one who would talk to her. Either way it made no difference. All she had left were the wire transfers, and she had no reason to believe they would contain information she didn’t already have.
