Short Summary of Asset Strippers

The CEO of a large international conglomerate, Maximilian de Beaulieu d’Appremont, Maxi, is in the process of acquiring the bankrupt American subsidiary of a European company in Alabama. While preparing to leave his home in Caen, France, a gruesome murder is discovered on his estate. The victim is a freelancer and former employee of his family company. Attempting to find the reason for the killing, Maxi unravels hidden secrets of his long-dead uncle, a former diplomat within a whole web of money laundering connections that link him to unsavory characters involved in the 1960s and 1970s in the worlds conflict zones. At the same time, the acquisition of the company in Alabama is plagued with problems. The discovery of a massive fraud scheme inside the company to be acquired leads to several assassination attempts on Maxi and his staff. Escaping back to Europe might be the only way for Maxi, an Asset Stripper - a financial manipulator who purchases companies cheaply, then breaking them up and selling off parts for as much as one can get - to save himself from those who pursue him.

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On Friday, October 7th, 1965, Charles-Antoine Eugène Pierre de Beaulieu d'Appremont, sat in a coffee shop in New York, contemplating what his next move, after having completed his Ph.D. in Politics and international relations at Columbia University should be. He is joined by a young graduate history student from Kansas City, studying at NYU, Julia Cohen, who tells him about some of the small miseries of her life. They start a relationship, and Charles invites her to his parents’ New York home in the upper East side of Manhattan.

Wanting to maintain family traditions, Charles applies to an international UN organization as a field officer’s job. Details of the employment are worked out during a visit to his family home in Geneva. He invites Julia to come along introducing her to meet his family. Charles is offered a field officers job located in South-East Asia when he returns to New York Shortly after receiving his appointment, Charles is visited by some people who say they are working for the CIA in South-East Asia and need some cash money to be transferred to legal bank accounts in Europe. Some security people known to Charles tell him that they are renegade members of the CIA’s secret operation in Laos and Vietnam making vast amounts of money pushing drugs .from the Burmese Shan states to the USA. They are looking for a person with financial savvy and good international connections to launder their money and channel it into the regular banking system. Through their contacts in the UNO organizations, they had found Charles.

Charles goes through the standard training for his new job in New York and Geneva while his relationship with Julia gets closer. He gets to his position in Saigon and Vientiane, looking after large numbers of refugees in camps, organizing their supplies and taking charge of the administration and management. Within a short time, some of the people who had unannounced visited him at his home in New York pressurize him to ship large amounts of cash in suitcases to the Middle East and Europe, depositing it in bank accounts. Having diplomatic immunity and access to the diplomatic planes of his organization, he is in a unique position to do that. Charles’ initial reluctance to do this, crumbles when Julia, on a visit to Charles in Laos during her long summer vacation is deliberately killed by the renegade CIA mob in a helicopter crash, visiting one of the refugee camps for which Charles is responsible.

After more than a year, Charles gets relocated to another war scenario, the Nigerian civil war between Nigeria and Biafra setting up refugee camps in Nigeria and Biafra. During the sacking of the first Biafran capital, Enugu Charles becomes a witness of the abandoning of large amounts of cash when the Biafran administration makes a hasty withdrawal with the assets from the Biafran National Bank to their new headquarter further inland in Umuahia. A few of the mercenaries helping the Biafrans recognize Charles from Laos and know about his usefulness as a person to launder the money which they had illegally acquired. They pressurize him to cooperate and use his weekly flights of a UN plane to Sharjah, Cyprus, and Geneva and his regular monthly visits to deposit the funds in bank accounts around Europe.

When Biafra is defeated, Charles joins his large family company in West Africa. Some of the former mercenaries join his company as highly p[aid freelance fixers of problems that occur in normal business operations in West Africa. Foreign aid financing for projects in which Charles’ company is involved is being used by an East German controlled company to finance acquisitions of Western technology for the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact countries. Financial irregularities lead to a confrontation and the assassination of Charles in a car accident in France in 1991.

©2019ajs Bert Berger – 649 words

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