In the end the seventeen banks were owed $2 billion, the employees $300 million, the airports $12 million, the income tax department froze accounts, and the government and the lenders hunted through jurisdictions where the monies came to rest in personal assets rather than the monthly run rate of the airline for which it was intended.
Nine years earlier the lenders had considered a debt for equity swap with a strike price of 62 a share when the underlying traded at 12 headed for a zero bid that was never reached because of market disbelief that the native son would choose exile as a colonial refugee rather than resurrect a business model that spent $1.20 for every $.80 it received.
There was $50 million for Formula One racing, $100 million laundered through at least seven balmy tax havens, $2 million for seventeen rooms on an island along with a yacht financed by a Qatari bank through a Luxembourg holding company, and $40 million for the kids routed through a liquor company payout.
There were two arrests, two bails, bankruptcy, extradition, appeals, and a biblical request for asylum. Court hearings and assets are agnostic. Judges preside, lawyers appear, orders are issued and none of this happens without coins for the jukebox. The lawyers applied to the judge for monies to be released in the UK from the sale of the French mansion for living expenses and legal fees otherwise the client would be at a disadvantage.
The appeal to fairness was unique. The client had absconded with $1 billion of native national bank deposits on a diplomatic passport one month before the curtain fell on the travel documents. The disadvantage to shareholders, lenders, and employees was that those monies ended up in other than native assets that were being attached, sold, and deposited in other than native courts to pay other than native expenses and lawyers. The judge ruled the monies would remain with the bankruptcy court except for a quarter of a million pounds to keep the jukebox spinning discs in hopes of delaying the last call for at least one generation.
Kleptocrats plan better. Those that abscond with country's riches for colonial refuge expect not to be arrested or have affairs managed by a series of courts. Rather budgets are ample enough to withstand a few hundred million in attachments with enough left over for the best law firms to threaten defamation suits that will prevent the rumpled laundry from hanging in the sunshine while former spouses conspicuously consume parcels of colonial real estate at prices only those that consume conspicuously could afford or would pay.
It is time to come home.
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