KARIM became one of Isabel’s hand-picked business intimates and slid easily and naturally into Murray’s CFO role two years before BBB was sold into an Initial Public Offering on the New York Stock Exchange. By then, she’d left the board and distanced herself from the business as part of her campaign to get elected to Congress. Even so, Karim’s betrayal had come as a shock to her.
Spencer Prentice, too, had been aghast. Though now a congressman himself, but on the opposite side of the aisle, he had long been Isabel’s confidante and during the IPO process had been investment banker to the deal. Having observed Karim at very close quarters he was impressed. At due diligence meetings, Spencer cross-examined the young CFO on everything: the budget items and expenses that concerned him, teasing out how reliable the revenue forecasts were, understanding what could go wrong with the business’s profit levers, querying the veracity of the internal systems. Everything. Even in the face of sustained probing, Karim hadn’t missed a beat.
“The best CFO I’ve seen in years,” Spencer had told investors and analysts.
So it was especially awkward when, only two months after BBB listed on the exchange, one of the audit juniors unearthed the fraud. He’d been up late ahead of the release of BBB’s first quarterly financial report and from the moment he tripped over the first tiny irregularity to Karim taking flight, it was only a few hours. Karim had misappropriated over four million dollars.
Market confidence in BBB Inc. was punctured the moment the chairman simultaneously announced the fraud and Karim Ahmed’s disappearance. The stock price haemorrhaged. BBB had been sold into the IPO at $30 per share. In those first two months of public trading, despite weak markets, the stock had still spiked up a solid 20 percent to $36, so the sudden plunge to $20 had seriously hurt.
Investors, the media, as well as Isabel’s opponents wanted a scapegoat. Fingers pointed in every direction, many at her. The headlines and newsbars were already clattering: Fraud smashes BBB but Burger Queen rolls in dough, and worse.
As soon as she’d heard the news, Isabel got put through to BBB’s chairman who was in the middle of a crisis board meeting. Spencer was with him, and they both left the boardroom to take her call.
“Isabel,” said Spencer with more than a hint of anxiety, “This isn’t your concern. You don’t need to do this.” She had offered an ex gratia payment, a gift to the company of the entire sum Ahmed had defrauded. Four million dollars.
“That’s where you’re wrong,” she told the two of them. “The investors who bought in at the IPO saw BBB as my company…”
“But you haven’t been involved for…”
“Whatever. They saw Karim as my man. They see this as my problem. Even if you don’t, I do. You’re telling me that Karim was doing this for years, so it started on my watch.”
The chairman smiled into the speakerphone. “It’s over-generous but you’re probably right. And it’ll certainly go a long way to relieving the board in the other room.”
“Not the whole way?”
“The market will still be worrying whether there’s more bad news to come.”
“Same deal. If there’s anything I should’ve known, I’m good for that too.”
There was more bad news, but when it broke Isabel could do little about it. The Islamic charity in Chicago that Karim had been syphoning off the funds to was a front for a terrorist enclave.
Even though no one could seriously put that at Isabel’s feet, it would continue to haunt her campaign.
13
IT TOOK OVER two years for authorities to capture Karim Ahmed and months after that for his trial to start, by this time smack in the middle of Isabel’s tilt for the presidency. Each day of court proceedings aimed new shots at her campaign, but they were only flesh wounds so far, despite Bobby Foster’s team blowing up every micro-development into a blunderbuss attack. Then one morning it stopped. The judge threw the case out on a technicality—evidence illegally obtained—and neither side of politics was happy.
The Republican presidential campaign was rocked today by a shock decision by Judge William Thomas to terminate the trial of Karim Ahmed, candidate Isabel Diaz’s former protégé… The disgraced chief financial officer of BBB Inc., the burger chain once owned by Ms Diaz, always protested his innocence and has now walked free.
Ahmed had been charged with thirteen counts of financing terrorist groups on United States’ soil, as well as eight counts of corporate fraud.
While Ahmed’s defence lawyer claims it is a victory for American justice, Democratic presidential hopeful Robert Foster rejects that. From his campaign bus in Wisconsin today, Mr Foster said:
Isabel Diaz’s friend and confidant has walked, but not because he is innocent. That these grave charges were tossed out on a technicality leaves the American people troubled, with unanswered questions about Isabel Diaz’s judgment and her fitness to hold office.