Chapter 63
Sunny
The thing about being a journalist is it can be hard to let things go.
It turns out that’s the case even if you’re no longer employed as a journalist. I was curled up on my childhood bed, heritage-listed laptop on my knees, searching for information about ZephEnergies Limited and Prometheus Power.
There was plenty of publicly available information about ZephEnergies, but I thought it was still worth a bit of a dig around.
Their interests were certainly well beyond wind energy.
They were on the shareholder registers of a couple of other nuclear power facilities.
Prometheus Power was more of a mystery. I’d called Stav, who’d used his lawyerly dark arts to help me dive a few levels deeper than simple Companies House searches.
He was a divorce lawyer, so he was used to digging around to find where the money was hidden.
Although he specialised in gay divorces, so his expertise was mostly in mediating joint custody arrangements for pugs.
“It’s a shell company,” Stav said. “It’s a UK company with fifty-one per cent UK ownership, but the remaining investors are based in the Channel Islands. That’s not uncommon.”
“Because it’s a tax haven?”
“Correct.”
“Can we find out who owns those offshore shares?”
There were some keyboard taps at the other end. “Major shareholding is a company called Highveld Industries. Also based in the Channel Islands.”
“And who owns that?”
“My friend, you are now in the realm of layering. You could be at this for days and never find the name of an actual traceable human.”
“I have time,” I said. “That’s the one thing I do have.”
“Well, I’ll leave you with it, then,” Stav said. “I’m meant to bill by the quarter hour, you know.”
As we hung up, my phone pinged. It was Ludo, again.
Seeing his name twisted a knife in my heart.
He had cost me everything, and he still wouldn’t leave me alone.
I couldn’t deal with it. I had to maintain focus.
I threw my phone on the bed and kept digging through the layers of Prometheus Power’s investment structure.