Pax Velloran
Character
Pax Velloran's Office | Coruscant, Collective Commerce District
Commercial Levels | DM if Interested
The job had seemed simple enough when Kellan Rohe brought it to him the previous evening. Find out who really controlled Merren Transit Group before Veylan Commercial Holdings committed serious credits to doing business with them.
The wording had stuck with Pax because Rohe had been unusually precise about it.
Rohe had occupied the visitor's chair with the easy patience of someone accustomed to meetings running longer than scheduled. He was somewhere in his early forties, conservatively dressed and carrying nothing more elaborate than a slim portfolio case. Senior Acquisitions Counsel for Veylan Commercial Holdings, according to the credentials he'd provided. Those had checked out before Pax let him through the door.
"Merren Transit Group," Rohe said, sliding a datapad across the desk. "We're considering an acquisition involving one of their bonded storage operations here on Coruscant. On paper, they're exactly what they appear to be."
Pax glanced down at the company profile. "That's usually considered a good thing."
"It is when you're buying freight capacity." A faint smile crossed Rohe's face. "Less so when nobody can tell you who has the final say."
Pax scrolled through the first page. Merren's principal shareholders were listed plainly enough. "Aster Vale Holdings. Coreward Mercantile. Rellis Commercial."
"I can read a registry, Mr. Velloran."
"I was hoping."
Rohe accepted that without offense. "Those are the legal owners. What I want to know is whether they're also the people making the decisions."
Pax looked up from the datapad.
Rohe leaned back slightly. "Merren has been willing to negotiate almost everything we've asked for. Price, facility access, staffing guarantees, even several terms I expected them to fight over. Then we reached one provision involving transfer rights and suddenly nobody in the room had the authority to approve it."
"Maybe they didn't."
"Perhaps." Rohe folded his hands loosely in his lap. "But negotiations stopped for three days while they consulted someone they wouldn't identify. When they came back, the answer was no."
That was more useful than anything in the company profile.
"You're buying into a company and don't know who controls it."
"We're considering buying into one," Rohe corrected. "And I'd prefer not to discover afterward that twenty-seven percent of the company means forty percent of the influence, or that three supposedly independent shareholders answer to the same agreement somewhere else."
Pax set the datapad on the desk. "So you want a beneficial owner."
"I want to know who gets the last word."
There was a subtle difference between the two, and Pax suspected Rohe knew it.
"How far do you want me to go?"
"As far as the records reasonably take you." Rohe reached into his portfolio and produced a second data wafer. "Corporate filings, trusts, guarantees, nominee arrangements. Whatever explains the control structure. I'm not asking you to steal anything."
"That's reassuring."
"Is it?"
"Usually."
Rohe laughed quietly and stood. "Find the person behind Merren, Mr. Velloran. Or tell me there isn't one. Either answer is useful."
Pax had quoted a fee that accounted for several days of corporate filings, financial disclosures and whatever time would inevitably be lost waiting for someone to answer a message they had already read. The client accepted without negotiating. That was mildly interesting, though not enough to make anything of by itself. Some people valued discretion more than credits, and others simply had enough credits that negotiating was a waste of time. Pax filed the detail away with the rest and went to work.
The ownership records were not much better. Three established institutional investors held most of Merren between them, with the remainder scattered among smaller commercial funds. Pax spent the better part of an hour working backward through all three and found legitimate businesses waiting for him at every turn. They had real offices, long tax histories and investments extending far beyond Merren. None ended at an empty address, a dead citizen or a company incorporated three weeks earlier by someone who had forgotten to invent employees.
He leaned back in his chair and looked from one ownership tree to the next. Three major shareholders, dozens of funds and several thousand pages of filings later, Pax still had no idea who got the last word. By that point he could have written Rohe a perfectly respectable report. Merren was legitimate, its ownership was distributed among established investors, and nothing in the public record pointed toward a hidden proprietor.
It would have answered who owned Merren. It wouldn't have answered who controlled it.
Pax reached for the caf beside his terminal, took a drink and made a face. Cold again. He set it aside and stopped looking at who owned Merren. Instead, he started looking at what Merren actually did.
Several acquisitions looked questionable at first. One warehouse was operating at less than half capacity despite Merren paying above market value for it; another facility had received expensive modernization work despite modest freight volume. Most became less interesting once Pax dug further. Seasonal traffic explained one, while control of neighboring loading berths explained another. Three did not resolve quite so neatly.
The cargo moving through them offered little connection. Their customers barely overlapped, and the facilities weren't positioned along the same major trade route. What they did share was infrastructure. Each maintained secure bonded handling areas substantially larger than its normal traffic appeared to require, complete with upgraded environmental systems, access controls and chain-of-custody monitoring that Merren had paid to install and then seemed to use only intermittently.
That did not make the properties suspicious by itself. Companies spent money preparing for contracts that never arrived, projected growth that failed to materialize or requirements that made perfect sense to whoever had approved them. Still, three underused facilities built around the same unusually specific capability gave Pax somewhere to look.
He pulled the Coruscant facility's shipping history onto another screen and began stripping away the ordinary traffic. Industrial machinery went first, followed by consumer goods, bulk freight, foodstuffs and everything else that appeared often enough to establish a baseline. What remained was mostly noise, but one entry caught his attention because the handling charge seemed unnecessarily high for what was being moved.
BONDED COMMERCIAL RECORDS — ARCHIVAL
The container had passed through the facility eleven days earlier. It carried no declared commercial value worth noting and nothing in the customs designation suggested dangerous or controlled material, yet whoever sent it had paid nearly three times the normal handling rate for isolated loading, environmental regulation and continuous custody logging. Pax checked the destination and found another Merren-associated facility. That was enough to make him search again. A second archival transfer appeared six weeks earlier, followed by a third farther back, all of them passing through properties whose investment had made relatively little sense when judged by ordinary freight volume.
He sat with that for a while, looking between the shipping records and Merren's ownership structure. There was probably an explanation. Companies kept records, old records occasionally had to be moved, and secure transport became expensive very quickly when lawyers were involved. The fact that something looked unusual from his desk did not mean it looked unusual to somebody who spent every day working in freight, and Pax knew somebody who did.
He opened his contacts and found Tovin Brask farther down the list than he expected. Their last exchange was nearly three months old and consisted mostly of Tovin asking whether Pax had finally replaced the regulator in his caf machine. Pax glanced at the mug beside him, decided there was no point answering that question directly and attached the records for the three facilities instead. He removed the ownership material, client information and everything else Tovin didn't need, leaving only the acquisitions, traffic figures and archival shipments.
Does any of this make sense to you?
He considered the message for a moment before adding another line.
You were right about the caf machine.
Pax sent it and returned to the shipping records. Less than a minute later, Tovin started typing. Then stopped. A few seconds later, the indicator appeared again.
// END RECORD