CHAPTER FOUR

Let me explain some things about the way our company works.  The first thing to understand is that we are, up to a point, democratic.  Put simply, we vote for our bosses.  Never mind about that for now; we'll come back to it.

Secondly, we're quite serious about insisting that if people want to rise above a certain level in the corporate hierarchy, they must renounce any religious faith they have previously espoused.  In practice all this means is that an executive promoted to the rank we once called magistratus, then Deacon, and now call Level Six, has to swear they've given up their faith.

We don't insist that people stop going to their churches or their temples, or stop worshipping either in public or in private, or even stop funding religious works (though some sort of gesture in this direction is generally expected and appreciated); we certainly do not insist that people stop believing in their heads, or their souls if you will.  All that's required is that people are prepared to swear they've stopped believing.  This is quite sufficient to weed out the real zealots, the type of people — admirable in their way if you esteem that sort of behaviour — who would prefer to be burned alive than switch to a different branch of the same church.

Thirdly, we practise total financial transparency: any company officer may inspect the accounts of any other.  This has become much easier technically in recent years, of course, with the advent of computers and electronic mail, but the principle has been around since the first century AD.  Its effect is to make corruption as a rule either unachievable or only possible at a trivial scale.  The main downside is complication.  This was the case when people had to open up cabinets full of wax tablets for inspection, when they had to unroll papyrus scrolls, when they had to unchain books from counting-room desks, when they had to order old ledgers from storage, when they had to search through microfiches, and it is certainly the case now with computerised accounts; over two millennia, every technological advance that promised to make the task easier has been closely and seemingly inevitably accompanied by an increase in the complexity of the figures and systems involved.

Always looking for ways to cut costs, we've carried out trials which involve abandoning this practice for specific times and in certain places, intending to give it up entirely if the trials prove successful, but the results have always persuaded us that the benefits outweigh the costs.

Of course, corruption is always possible, and probably inevitable.  A company worry has always been that one of our number might siphon off very small amounts of money over a long period and use that as seed capital for transactions which — though they exist outside the Business — are only possible thanks to the contacts, trust and information that person's membership of the company has brought and which grow exponentially until they distort the relationship between the apparent and real economic effect that person produces.

This sort of scam has been tried by various individuals in the past, but as a rule such perpetrators are discovered; unless they intend to bury their gains in the ground they have to do something with the profits, and an executive living significantly beyond their so easily checkable means has always been a sure sign some sort of chicanery has been going on.  If somebody plays the long game of building up a big cash fund somewhere we can't see while continuing to live relatively modestly, and then retires early, suddenly seriously moneyed, to their own Caribbean island, we are not above indulging in our own style of chicanery to try and recover the funds we reckon belong to us.  We aren't the Mafia and as far as I know we don't blow anybody's legs off, but it's surprising what you can do when you have your own Swiss bank and you're owed favours that go back in some cases for centuries.  Actually, maybe it's not surprising at all.

Still, it is possible to beat the system, big time.  In the late nineteenth century a certain Monsieur Couffable, one of our senior French executives, made a sizeable independent fortune on the Paris Bourse, which we didn't know about until he died.  He'd spent every centime buying Dutch old masters, which he kept in a secret art gallery beneath his Loire château.  So there you are; you do have to bury your money in the ground.

We never did get our hands on those paintings, despite having some very capable lawyers and the co-operation of the late Monsieur Couffable's widow (they were childless, he'd willed the secret collection to his mistress).  Anyway, this practice has now become known as Couffabling.  As a business, we try very hard not to get Couffabled.

Usually what's ours stays ours.  A legitimately made fortune is never entirely personal in the Business, and specifically it is impossible to bequeath all you've made to your offspring or, indeed, anybody else who isn't one of us.  The higher a person rises within our company, the greater becomes the proportion of their income paid in the form of stock options, pension rights, travel and other perks and so on.

So far so normal; lots of corporations limit the personal tax exposure of their senior people by giving them access to and often unlimited use of cars and drivers, apartments, mansions, aircraft and yachts.  The Lear jet might belong to the company and be shown as a tax-liable item on the corporate books, but it's at the exclusive disposal of the CEO, who can use it to go shopping or golfing if he damn well pleases.  In the same way, it's the company that pays for the box at the opera or the ball game, and the membership of the yacht or country club.

We do the same sort of thing, except perhaps more so.

The difference between us and others lies in the disposability of the assets that are nominally the property of the executive involved.  Most of these can be sold back only to others in the Business, and even then there is a strict ranking of how much one can own according to one's hierarchical level.

What this means is that dynasties are difficult to establish and almost impossible to maintain; no matter how doting a father in the Business may be, he cannot pass on all his power and money to a favourite son just because he wants to.  The father can make the son rich by most people's standards and he can attempt to further his boy's career in the company, but he cannot make Junior as rich as he has been or ensure that he too achieves the organisation's summit.

The vast majority of senior execs are quite happy with this arrangement, as they're usually the sort of people who believe that hard work and brains are the keys to success and have formed a dim view of any privilege which has been inherited rather than earned.  This sort of attitude can actually be seen more clearly outside the Business, where quite a few very rich and successful fathers who've been in total charge of their own companies have left their children an only modest provision in their wills, not through general or specific vindictiveness but just to ensure that their offspring don't start out spoiled, and so that they too will know that if they do achieve anything it has at least partially been due to their own abilities rather than the sheer good luck of having a rich daddy.

Naturally, all this changes if the individual in the company invents something or has patents to their name.  Take Uncle Freddy, for example.  An Associate Level Two, he would probably only be a Level Five or Six but for the fact that he invented the chilpTM.  The chilpTM is the technical name (Uncle Freddy's own; I think he's a trifle sad it never caught on) for those little containers of whitish liquid that you get in tourist class in aircraft or in cafés, service stations and not very good hotels instead of a proper jug of milk.