Moving Day (1)
The café by Gangnam Station was packed with office workers, probably because it was lunchtime. I scanned the room and found a woman seated by the window.
She was wearing slacks with a striped oversized shirt, and her face was still as small and pretty as ever. The hair she usually kept neatly tied back was let down today, and she had on a necklace and earrings I’d never seen her wear before.
She was so beautiful that the men around her kept sneaking glances her way. One of them finally worked up the courage to approach.
He straightened his back and spoke with confidence. “Um, hello. I noticed you when you came in earlier, and if you don’t mind…”
At that moment, she raised a hand high. “Over here, Miru.”
I walked over to the table.
The man who’d tried to talk to her gave an awkward little smile and returned to his seat. For some reason, I felt a little sorry for him.
“It’s been a while, Sung Yoon-ah.”
Sung Yoon-ah greeted me with a bright smile.
I wasn’t even sure how many months it had been since I’d last seen her. Maybe that was why I felt genuinely happy to see her again.
She looked even prettier than she had before. Was it because she’d changed her makeup?
“How was your trip to the States?”
“It was fine.”
“You said you were only going for a little while. Why were you gone so long?”
“Honestly, I didn’t expect it to drag on either.”
I’d gone on a tourist visa and spent the whole time working instead of sightseeing.
“Hang on. I’ll order first. What do you want?”
“An Americano.”
“Hot?”
“Yes.”
I ordered the coffee and sat down.
“How’s work been lately?”
“Same as ever, really.”
“I saw the article about Yuseong Securities joining that consortium this time.”
“It’s thanks to Chairman Yoo Jae-ho looking out for us.”
“That’s good.”
Because the acquisition price for the overseas infrastructure project was the largest on record, articles about it had exploded everywhere.
DA Securities had gotten all the publicity without spending a single won on it.
The total acquisition price was about 700 billion won, and DA Securities was responsible for 100 billion of that. To raise the money, they’d launched a new fund.
Since it was effectively backed by Yuseong Securities, the fund sold out the moment it was launched. Thanks to that, the stock price had also recovered to where it had been before the Primus scandal.
This time, Sung Yoon-ah asked me, “Did Continue Capital really acquire Kulaud?”
“You heard about it.”
“I read the article.”
It was a fairly big story in financial circles, but because Kulaud was a B2B company, ordinary people were a little less interested.
It had also been somewhat buried under the fallout from Rolf Buchi’s fraud.
For the record, Ranjin Kumar had gone on interviews with the Wall Street Times and several other outlets, loudly and passionately tearing into Rolf with everything he had.
He must have been carrying around a lot of resentment.
“I heard there were plenty of firms that had already wanted to invest in Kulaud. How did you pull off the acquisition?”
The world’s largest private equity fund, Redstone, Chairman Aaron Baker’s White Road, sovereign funds like Temasek—they had all shown interest more than once.
And yet, out of nowhere, a brand-new private equity firm no one had really heard of had succeeded in buying it.
“It’s thanks to what Director Lockhart did.”
“They say the company’s worth was one hundred billion dollars.”
“Ah, that’s just people tossing around numbers as they please.”
Private companies weren’t easy to value.
Kulaud’s estimated worth had been all over the map, from thirty billion dollars on the low end to a hundred billion on the high end. Blue Pearl had supposedly tried to value it at one hundred billion dollars and invest on that basis, but nothing ever came of it.
“And the founders left, too.”
With founder Rolf Buchi and Alex Preston both out of the company, the market had started valuing Kulaud at less than half its previous worth.
Some people were even predicting it would lose momentum and collapse before long.
Of course, that was before Syd’s genius became known, so it wasn’t exactly an unreasonable conclusion.
“But where did the money for the acquisition come from? Is it true there’s another source of capital behind Continue Capital?”
They had announced the acquisition, but they hadn’t disclosed exactly what percentage of the company had been bought, or at what price.
Either way, because the deal was estimated to be worth at least several tens of billions of dollars, people in finance assumed there must be another source of capital behind Continue Capital—and that this capital was the real buyer.
“We’ve only signed the contract. The whole process isn’t finished yet. It’s still in progress.”
If we couldn’t come up with the remaining eight billion dollars within the next six months, the deal would fall apart.
We’d lose the four-billion-dollar deposit and have to settle for a 31.16 percent stake. Even then, since 10 percent of that had already been transferred to Syd, what we actually held was 21.16 percent.
“Still, isn’t Continue Capital bigger now than all of DA Financial Group combined?”
“Hmm. Is it?”
“Even just Kulaud alone would put you easily inside the top ten conglomerates in Korea.”
After all, Hwaan Group, which ranked seventh, had a market cap of around seventy trillion won.
“If we’re talking like that, then the fifth-largest business group in Korea is MKK Partners.”
MKK Partners was a Korean private equity fund founded by Chairman Kang Myeong-guk after he left the Kannan Group.
Even if you excluded the firms they’d already sold off, the combined market cap of the companies they currently owned was more than enough to place them fifth in the country.
That made them not only the biggest private equity firm in Korea, but in all of Asia. They were practically a living legend in Korean finance.
“That’s amazing. It feels like just yesterday you quit and went off on your own, and now you’ve achieved something enormous in just a few months. How does it feel to make that much money?”
“Honestly, it doesn’t feel all that real.”
Still, watching the amount of money I handled change by the day was pretty entertaining.
Sung Yoon-ah looked at me and asked, “Why haven’t you been in touch very much?”
I smiled. “I’ve just been a little busy.”
Which wasn’t a lie. I really had been running around without a moment to breathe.
Then she tilted her head. “Speaking of which, where’s my present?”
“Ah!”
Sung Yoon-ah’s eyes widened.
“What? You didn’t bring me anything?”
“Of course I did.”
I handed her the drawing tube.
“It’s a gift.”
“What is this?”
“Open it.”
She pulled out the painting from the tube.
“It’s a painting.”
“Yes. Do you like it?”
Far from being disappointed, she seemed genuinely thrilled.
“Of course I do. I love paintings. Where did you buy it?”
“At a street stall in Central Park.”
“Huh. It kind of has a Banksy feel to it.”
Her words caught me off guard.
“Oh! How did you know?”
“Huh? What do you mean?”
“That really is a Banksy.”
At my words, Sung Yoon-ah broke into a smile.
“Come on, don’t joke around.”
“I’m serious.”
The smile faded from her face. Sung Yoon-ah looked back and forth between the painting and me.
“You’re saying this is a Banksy?”
“Yes.”
“Where did you get it?”
“I bought it from a street stall in Central Park.”
“What in the—”
Then, as if she’d suddenly figured something out, her eyes flew wide open.
“Wait. Don’t tell me the Mister Han who bought every Banksy painting in Central Park was you, Miru?”
“You saw the Twit post?”
“Of course. It even made the news.”
Sung Yoon-ah looked like she couldn’t possibly believe it.
“N-no way. How on earth…?”
I brushed it off casually. “I just liked it and bought it, but I only found out after reading the Twit post.”
“Still, that means you recognized it as a good painting. The art critic apparently said the dealer couldn’t even draw a proper line when he was reviewing it.”
“I got lucky.”
I’d bought the paintings because I knew the future, but the fact that I’d happened to be there that day was pure luck. Because of that, I’d been able to buy the others too.
After staring at the painting in a daze for a moment, she said, sounding shocked, “W-wait. Then this one sheet must be worth more than five hundred thousand dollars, right?”
“Probably.”
“Is it really okay to give me something this expensive?”
“Of course.”
“No taking it back later.”
I’d received so much help from her that I didn’t really mind. Besides, I’d bought it for only sixty dollars.
I’d already given one painting each to Sunwoo and Sung Yoon-ah, and I still had ten left. Just thinking of them as five million dollars’ worth made me feel absurdly secure.
By the time we finished talking, our coffee was gone.
“You said you were looking at places today, right?”
“Yes. The place I’m living in now is a little too small, so I’m moving.”
“Where to?”
“A friend has to commute to Pangyo for a while, so somewhere around here. I’d like something spacious and clean.”
“Are you planning to buy?”
“Of course not. I’m renting.”
“How much rent were you thinking?”
“Doesn’t matter. I’m going to rent it under the company name anyway. Might as well live somewhere nice.”
Even if the company was mine.
Sung Yoon-ah looked a little surprised. “That’s unexpected. I thought you were only interested in investing and didn’t care much about things like that.”
“Well…”
It wasn’t that I didn’t care. It was that I hadn’t had any money before.
Investors tended to convert the money they had in the present into future value in their heads.
If you had a hundred million won, you’d think of it as money that could become a billion later. That was why they lived frugally and saved every possible won.
Take Aaron Baker of White Road, probably the most famous investor alive. He was one of the five richest people in the world, and yet he still lived in the modest two-story house he’d bought when he was newly married, now worth about five hundred thousand dollars. He drove a small Japanese car that was more than ten years old, and he ate McMuffins for breakfast.
But I had no intention of living like that.
Since I’d already regressed, I was going to enjoy everything I’d never been able to before. I wanted a nice house, a nice car, nice clothes, and good food.
Money could always be made again, couldn’t it?
Sung Yoon-ah thought about it for a moment, then said, “Should I introduce you to a real estate agent?”
“Do you know someone?”
“There’s an office that handles only high-end listings. A friend of mine found a house through them not long ago, so I’ll ask around.”
I’d been dreading the idea of running around to real estate offices one by one, so that worked out perfectly.
“Then I’d appreciate it.”
After lunch, someone came to meet us.
The man, who looked to be in his mid-forties, handed me his business card with great politeness. “Hello. I’m Kim Hee-jun, a manager at GN Real Estate Consulting.”
He must have dealt with plenty of important clients before, because his expression was warm, and both his clothes and manner were impeccably respectful.
After I told him what I was looking for, he pulled up a few listings on his tablet that matched my conditions.
“Which of these is available for immediate move-in?”
“How about this one? You can move in today.”
Just from the photos, I already liked it quite a bit.
“Let’s go take a look.”
We got into the agent’s car and headed out.
The place we arrived at was a luxury villa on the banks of the Han River in Cheongdam-dong.
The entrance was split into two sections on either side of the front door, and because it was a duplex, the ceilings were high, with bedrooms upstairs as well.
Through windows twice the height of a person, the Han River spread out below us.
“What’s the monthly rent?”
“The deposit is two hundred million won, and the rent is sixteen and a half million won a month, tax included.”
“That’s reasonable.”
Compared to the place I was living in now, it was more than ten times as expensive. But compared to this place, my current home was no different from a shack.
The location was excellent, and the view was excellent too. Since it was rent anyway, I could just live here for a while and move if I didn’t like it.
Real estate was an asset.
If you bought a good house and held onto it, the price went up. You could satisfy both your living needs and your investment goals at the same time.
But rent was money that vanished as soon as you spent it.
That was why rich people bought homes when they needed them.
My case was a little different, though. I was confident I could make far more money than any rise in house prices ever could.
In fact, tying up a huge sum in a house would be the real loss.
“Let’s do it. Can you call a moving truck for me right away?”
The agent broke into a beaming smile. “Yes. Of course.”