For The Love Of Money - Brian Doswell (speed reading book .TXT) 📗

surprised.’
Emma fought back her anger and relaxed in her chair.
David began again. ‘This is really a very simple plan. You and your husband bought this house in joint names nine years ago for £82,000 and it is now worth close to £250,000. Your husband has continued to pay the mortgage on the property and is entitled to a share of the property value. However, if you wish to re-mortgage your half of the property, the bank would be pleased to advance you an amount equal to the amount re-mortgaged.’
Emma shook her head. ‘I’m not sure that I fully understand that. Would you say it again slowly please.’
‘OK. Let’s suppose that your half of the house is worth £125,000, and your half of the purchase price was £41,000, then the bank will accept a re-mortgage up to the value of, say £80,000. However, I have calculated that your debts amount to just under £43,000 and I strongly suggest that we do not get carried away and that we stick to that amount. My plan is that we advance that amount against your interest in this house and clear all your outstanding debts. That way you get a clean start. It’s up to you how you manage your finances after that. This is a one-time plan. Next time, if there is a next time, the additional value will be gone.’
Emma shook her head again. ‘Can it be that simple?’
‘Well, there is a small penalty. Your ex-husband agrees the plan but refuses to increase his share of the mortgage payments. You will have to make the additional payments; over 25 years that would be in the order of £300 per month. How does that sound?’
‘Great.’
‘I will go ahead and arrange the paper work then.’
Emma held the door open and, as he left, he turned towards her with that smile across his face.
‘Please believe, I don’t normally do this but - might you be free for dinner on Friday evening?’


WALL STREET NOT MAIN STREET

Andrew Fitzgerald McAllister left his Docklands office early on Thursday 11 September 2008. Friday would be his thirty-eighth birthday and he was planning to take Lucy to the coast in the shiny new Porsche that he had ordered as a birthday present to himself, and he planned to collect first thing on Friday morning.
Late summer sun glinted on the Thames as he elected to walk to the West India Quay station on the Docklands Light Railway. One of Andrew’s private, childish indulgences was to sit in the front seat of the driverless train as it rattled its automated way from stop to stop, while he pretended to be the driver. At Tower Hill he flipped a mental coin to decide if he took a taxi or the Circle Line to Marylebone and his train home to Gerrards Cross. The mental coin landed tails up, but he ignored it and took a taxi across town anyway. Andrew was in an ebullient mood, given the state of the market, his week had been better than he might reasonably have expected.
On the previous Monday he had been browsing a link to some secondary European stocks and noticed a small German company that was trying to raise some investment capital, not much, a few million euros. The curious thing was that the company happened to have a familiar name. Edelman, or something similar, was the name that his great-grand-parents had used in pre-war Germany. Andrew had a fuzzy history of his mother’s ancestors leaving Germany between the wars and living in America for several years before coming back to Scotland in the 50’s, where she met and married Ewan McAllister.
Edelman’s was a specialist engineering works based 10 kilometres south of Stuttgart, the home of Mercedes who was also the principal customer for Edelman’s precision engine components. The on-line prospectus said all the usual marketing stuff but offered very little detail beyond the brochure level.
On impulse, Andrew rang his mother to ask about the possibility of a family link. Mary McAllister confirmed her parents family name but she was not able to help any further. Andrew made excuses about pressure of work to avoid getting into conversation with his mother and returned to the screen on his desk. The sub-text to the Edelman rights issue included a few paragraphs about expansion plans and retooling for an up-coming round of Mercedes contracts. Nothing unusual in the text, but there was the merest hint of these new contracts being speculative. If the contracts failed to materialise, the new stock would be worth less than the proverbial paper it was written on. Andrew considered two options: fund the issue and hold for the stock to improve when the contracts were announced, or fund the issue and sell the stock on quickly while the market was enjoying the honeymoon period of the new issue. Should he go for a long term possible profit or a short term, guaranteed small profit? The question hung in his mind. The amounts involved were borderline for his desk. Normally he would be looking for investment opportunities in a range ten times this amount.
Andrew leaned back in his chair and gazed out of the windows overlooking the Docklands panorama, surveying his empire. He loved the crisp, newly-built skyline littered with satellite dishes enabling him to reach all four corners of the world without leaving his desk. The high white towers seemed to him to be a fitting complement for the high flying investment banking business that he so much enjoyed. However, on this occasion, instinct told him Edelman’s would be too much trouble for too little gain, he should dump it and find something else; he needed a hot coffee and a cool change of line.
At the multi-choice coffee dispenser, the mobile phone in his pocket started to vibrate. He answered the call.
“Andrew, it’s your mother.”
“Hello Mother, didn’t we just speak?”
“Edelman, I remembered, I have a second cousin called Franz Edelman in Germany somewhere. Does that help you dear?”
“That’s great mum, thanks a lot. I must go. I’ll call you at the weekend.”
Andrew sensed that she had more to say but conversations with his mother always seemed to drift aimlessly around and he didn’t feel up to the task of following her.
Back at his desk the coincidence intrigued him. The principal contact name on the prospectus had been Herr Doctor Franz Edelman. He tossed the empty paper coffee cup into the bin and dialled the number in Stuttgart.
“This is Andrew McAllister from Coulter Brothers in London, may we speak in English?”
“Certainly Mr. McAllister, how can we help you?”
“Can I speak personally to Herr Doctor Franz Edelman?”
“Can I tell him what this is about?”
“Will you tell him that I am the son of Mary McAllister, her parents were Eric and Julia Edelman and I think we might be related?”
Wallpaper music told him that he had been put on hold.
“Good morning, this is Franz Edelman . . . .”
Andrew explained the sequence of events that had led up to this call and then let Franz Edelman launch into a lengthy sales pitch, extolling the virtues of his family engineering plant and personally guaranteeing the inevitable success of the future contracts with Mercedes.
Their conversation concluded with Franz offering to research his side of the family history and fly to London on Wednesday morning, to meet with Andrew and discuss the required finance for his business.
Andrew stayed at his desk over lunchtime weighing up the pros and cons of doing business within the family. In many ways he was already regretting having opened the door to this possibility. He preferred the anonymity of being the party on the other side of the back-office team. He rarely met any of the people whose money lined the coffers of Coulter Brothers and A.F. McAllister in turn.
On the other hand, this was a special case, his mother was bound to ask about it sooner or later and he would need a story to tell. He could also smell a deal.
On Wednesday morning Andrew met Franz in the arrivals lounge at Heathrow. He would have preferred City Airport but there was no direct flight from Stuttgart so he settled for a late start to the day and a comparatively short drive in his air-conditioned S-type Jaguar, from Gerrards Cross to Heathrow. Andrew loved his Jaguar but he was looking forward to collecting the Porsche on Friday. He had always wanted to say, “My second car is a Porsche.” On Friday morning, his dream would come true.
Doctor Franz Edelman was tall and stick-thin with a mass of pure white hair brushed back in waves that settled around the collar of his jacket like an ermine ruff. His pale blue eyes scanned the line of taxi drivers, holding cards with passenger’s names, until he found the card with his name.
“Good morning Andrew. I’m so glad to be in England again it’s been several years. Too long. Far too long.”
Andrew folded the name card that he had been holding into four and slid it into his pocket before extending a welcoming hand to grasp that offered by Franz.
Andrew’s plan was for them to drive to the Runnymede Hotel where they could talk over lunch and be close enough to get back to Heathrow for the late afternoon flight to Stuttgart. He took the Stanwell Moor Road out of the airport complex to avoid the motorway traffic and they were soon in the still, leafy-green countryside that borders the Thames, the same river but a whole world away from the concrete, commercial environment of Docklands. Andrew pondered over the number of significant deals that had been done between cautious, prospective partners in Runnymede since King John had put his seal on the Magna Carta. This was never going to be in that league but the thought amused him, he would have enjoyed being King John.
Andrew’s forte at meetings like this was to listen. He deliberately provoked Franz with loaded questions from time to time but mostly he listened.
Franz had two stories to tell, the first was of his family history and the second was how his grandfather had built the factory to supply engine parts for use in German army tanks during the First World War. Inevitably the two stories overlapped in many places. It appeared that Mary McAllister’s grandfather was one of seven brothers. He had disagreed with the others over the political stance in Germany between the wars and had left for America, fully intending to represent the family engineering works wherever possible. Once the Second World War started, that scheme was lost in the turmoil of the times, as indeed, all contact was lost between the branches of the family until the mid-fifties when admitting to being German became a little less difficult. Since the war, a total of over sixty years, Edelman’s had been a supplier of high quality engineering parts to Mercedes.
Franz Edelman shrugged off Andrew’s question with an expression of supreme confidence. “How could they possibly lose such a prestigious contract after such a long and fruitful partnership?”
Andrew declined to respond. Instead he ordered coffee to be served on the terrace and they moved out from the elegant dining room to enjoy the warmth of the afternoon and the mellow sound of the river as it wound its way through the nearby meadows. It occurred to him that at no time had Franz mentioned any hint of competition for these critical contracts. In Andrew’s book, if a client failed to mention something, it was usually because there was some sticky little detail that they preferred to remain unsaid. He wondered if there was an Eastern European bidder on the scene. He would do an internet search when he got back to his desk.
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