He had not been joking. He was showing off. He stood up at his own wedding and publicly thanked the man whose company had been used to move investor money, in front of sixty of those investors, and every single one of them clapped.
That is the thing about the whole of this. Nobody hid anything at that wedding. They were not being careless. They genuinely did not think of any of it as something to hide.
What happened afterwards.
On the eighteenth of November, Ines Talbot and I sat in a room with the Serious Fraud Directorate for six hours.
All of it went in. The folder. The trust deed. The forged transfers. The photo gallery. The seating plan.
The officer who took it — a woman called Marguerite Oyelowo — spent the last forty minutes of that meeting on the seating plan and not on the bank statements.
She explained why, and I have thought about it ever since.
The money had been through so many hands that proving who knew what would take years. But a seating plan puts named people in a room on a named date. A photograph puts them shoulder to shoulder. And a man who has sworn in writing that he has never met another man cannot easily explain standing next to him under a banner with his own company’s name on it.
