Then I told him that while I am an employee of Dufresne, currently I working for Lederman. According to the Dufresne principal, I reminded him, when you work for the client, you ARE the client. I was about to go into this philosophy in detail when he asked me to shut up and sit down. Then he told me that someone in the Lederman London office was leaking confidential information to the US banking authorities. Apparently the London operations, especially Tom Pastrami, has been under investigation in the US since May. I asked Dominic why. He said it had something to do with the FarmerCard acquisition in 2006.

I was brain fucked. I didn’t know what to say. For a moment the room was spinning around me and moving up a little. I was that surprised. And then I realized that my swivel chair was loose and the air pressure had dropped a little. So I moved to another chair.

I asked Dominic how he knew all this. And then he dropped another bombshell. Turns out that Dufresne has been cooperating with this investigation since May. They had not informed Dominic or the other team members because apparently we might be under investigation as well. Dominic had learnt all this from a lawyer friend in Dufresne New York and someone at the SEC who studied with him at INSEAD. He had been missing all this while because he was travelling and arranging secret meetings.

Slowly, little by little, I began to sob. There was water in my eyes. I asked Dominic if they know about our arrangement with Tom. He said so far our deal was below the radar. But there is no guarantee it will stay that way. The US guys might catch us.

Now I broke down and started crying. Dominic didn’t say anything for two minutes. And then he told me that from this point onwards we had to proceed with extreme caution. I was to tell Tom about these developments, abort whatever I was doing for him through LLTLF, erase all records and get back to doing regular work. If the investigators or their spy decided to look at us we had to look crystal clear. Even if Tom got arrested at some point, and even if he pointed fingers at us, the investigators must have no proof whatsoever.

Dominic then told me to leave and keep my eyes open. He still had no idea who the mole was. All that his contact at SEC knew was that the person started feeding information around the time Lederman II started.

Diary I cannot tell what emotions were going through me at that point in time. On the one hand I was panicking. If this spy found about the Isle of Man operation …