DA Securities Executive Director (2)
Executive Director Yang Ja-eun spoke as though she were offering advice.
“You may be new enough not to know this, but organizations always put their own instincts first. Do you know what happens to whistleblowers inside a company?”
“I don’t care. I’m planning to quit anyway.”
“……”
At my answer, she looked utterly incredulous.
There was nothing scarier than someone who had already decided to leave a job.
“If you’ve already decided to blow this up, why are you telling me?”
“Because if pointing out the rot doesn’t lead to a proper investigation, then it’s meaningless. The group needs a thorough internal probe, and the people responsible have to be punished. And once this breaks, Park Tae-il, the CEO of Primus Asset Management, will try to flee overseas immediately. So we need to catch him before that happens and recover as much of the remaining assets as we can, as fast as possible.”
In the real timeline, Park Tae-il did exactly that—he hurriedly pulled out even the assets left in the fund and fled to Vietnam just before everything exploded.
According to what was uncovered later, he had been preparing his escape for months, ever since redemptions started to become difficult. He was repatriated to Korea five years after that, but not a single won of the hidden wealth was ever recovered.
Executive Director Yang Ja-eun looked at me and asked, “Are you saying I should do that?”
“Yes. Once this blows up, the person in charge will do everything possible to drag things out—blocking the press, delaying the Financial Supervisory Service investigation, anything to buy time.”
The person I meant, of course, was Yang Jeong-uk.
He had already been chosen as the next chairman.
The reason he had moved to DA Securities was to build the kind of results he could show the board and the shareholders.
And the biggest piece of that track record was Primus Fund. If that turned out to be fraud, it would be an unprecedented disaster.
Who in their right mind would agree to put the chairman of a financial group on the seat if he had failed to supervise the asset manager properly and caused trillions of won in losses?
If there were enough time, he could lie low until the dust settled and then make his comeback, but there wasn’t much time left.
It hadn’t been made public, but the current chairman, Yang Hyeon-seong, was suffering from a brain tumor. He would die four years later, and Yang Jeong-uk would inherit the company without trouble.
“DA Financial Group needs to cooperate actively so the press can report this properly and the Financial Supervisory Service can move quickly. That would be in your best interest too, Executive Director.”
“Can you take responsibility for what you’re saying?”
Her voice had begun to tremble slightly. She wasn’t stupid—she had to have sensed how huge this opportunity was.
“Of course. If I couldn’t, I wouldn’t have brought it up.”
Executive Director Yang Ja-eun fell silent and seemed to think it over for a long moment, and I waited for her to speak first.
“Do you want something from me?”
“Yes.”
She looked as if she had expected as much.
“What is it?”
“First, the victims of Primus Fund need to be properly compensated. Once this breaks, the Financial Supervisory Service will recommend that anyway.”
There was no reason to postpone compensation that had to happen eventually. And the bigger the losses the company took, the more responsibility would fall on Yang Jeong-uk.
“And?”
“Please see DA Securities through this to the very end. The ordinary employees did nothing wrong.”
Even if losses in the four-hundred-billion-won range were to appear at once, the group could still absorb them. Considering how much money had already been poured in, there would be no need to sell the company off if we could just get through this crisis.
“I can’t promise a hundred percent, but I’ll do everything I can.”
I nodded.
“Then that’s enough.”
She looked startled.
“That’s all?”
I gave a small shrug.
“What else would I need?”
She asked, sounding genuinely confused, “What do you get out of this?”
In truth, I didn’t get any direct benefit from this at all.
No one was going to hand me an award for exposing the fund’s insolvency. If anything, I’d probably end up taking all the blame and leaving the company under a cloud.
And I couldn’t exactly ask her to set aside a position for me. If I did, it would look as if she had orchestrated everything from behind the scenes.
Well, I could ask for a little something on the side, I supposed…
I smiled.
“Because it lets me correct a wrong, prevent something that should never happen, and keep someone unqualified from sitting in a seat they don’t deserve. That’s enough for me.”
If Yang Jeong-uk went down, the odds of her becoming the heir would rise. Compared with pocketing a few under-the-table crumbs, it was better to make the next chairman of DA Financial Group owe me a favor.
The DA Securities new hire bowed and took his leave.
Left alone, Executive Director Yang Ja-eun stayed buried in thought for a long time after he was gone.
What on earth was he?
His face still carried all the awkwardness of someone fresh out of school, but nothing about his words or behavior felt like a rookie’s.
He wasn’t just confident in his own judgment—he seemed to understand, with unsettling clarity, the scale of the fallout this scandal would cause and the chain of events that would follow.
She knew her brother’s temperament well. If he became chairman, would she really be able to keep her current position?
No matter how she thought about it, the answer was doubtful.
Once her brother had taken the chairman’s seat, even if this scandal had broken, it would probably have done little more than scratch him. He would have sacrificed a few underlings and slipped away cleanly.
But if it breaks now…?
She had been born before her brother and had worked for the group longer than he had. She believed she was better than him, too.
And yet the heir was still his to inherit.
The reason was only one thing. She was a woman.
There had never been a female CEO at a financial group. She had more or less given up on that dream herself.
And yet the thing she had thought was absolutely impossible was beginning to look real.
Executive Director Yang Ja-eun looked over the documents the new employee had left behind.
Could this really be true?
There were a few suspicious transactions here and there, but it was still too early to call the entire fund insolvent based on this alone.
First she would investigate. If it turned out to be false, she could simply stay quiet. But if it turned out to be true…
Then I need to move the press and the Financial Supervisory Service in sync with the timing of the exposure and make the whole thing blow up as hard as possible.
Of course, Yang Jeong-uk would move in the opposite direction. He would try to minimize the damage and pin everything on the asset manager.
But he didn’t know this was coming, while she did. So while her brother would be flailing around, she would have to move with ruthless precision.
Executive Director Yang Ja-eun made a call to someone.
“I need you to check the bond transaction records for me. Find out which firms bought the privately placed bonds I mentioned. Do this in secret, and make sure no one else knows.”
Jungheung Economic News was a specialized financial daily with more than fifty years of history, part of the Jungheung Media Group, and it even owned a comprehensive programming channel.
Min Hong-soo, a reporter on the economics desk, was eating lunch while scouring several websites for something worth turning into a story.
In the old days, he would have camped out at companies, the police agency, the prosecutors’ office, or the Financial Supervisory Service to gather information, but in the twenty-first century, the important news usually flowed through the internet.
Another day of useless junk.
DA Securities Report
Primus Fund Investment Caution Advisory
Among the fund’s asset purchases, numerous suspicious items have been found. Despite the claim that it invests only in public-institution receivables, there is a strong possibility that it has invested in privately placed bonds issued by distressed companies, so investors should exercise extreme caution. EPNK, which was recently suspended from trading on KOSDAQ, issued 30 billion won in convertible bonds shortly before the halt, and those bonds were purchased by Primus Fund. In addition, ParadisePeak, EightCash, YMC Money, and NineOrion appear to be directly linked to Primus Fund shareholders and executives, so the Financial Supervisory Service must begin a thorough investigation…
Then he opened the report that had just been uploaded, and his eyes widened.
“Senior! Take a look at this!”
At his shout, Park Gwang-il, a senior reporter, leaned in from behind him.
“What is it?”
“DA Securities put out a report about one of their funds…”
“Why? Did they say it was a high-return fund?”
“N-no. It says the Primus Fund is dangerous and warns people to be careful about investing in it.”
“What? The Primus Fund? You mean the one Park Tae-il runs?”
“Yes. That one.”
Anyone on the economics desk knew enough about Primus Fund.
That was only natural. Park Tae-il was a celebrity in the bond market, and Primus Asset Management had been one of the biggest success stories among private funds in recent years.
Jungheung Economic News had even interviewed Park Tae-il directly, and on DA Securities’ request they had once written what was essentially a fund promotion piece disguised as an article.
“They’re saying a fund with more than one trillion won under management is risky?”
“Yes.”
“Who wrote this analyst report?”
“The report doesn’t list a name, but I checked, and it looks like it was written by an RA who joined the research department this year.”
“What? So a rookie uploaded this kind of report on their own?”
For a securities firm to issue a caution report saying that one of the funds it exclusively sold was dangerous was something no one had ever seen before.
“Is he crazy?”
“He doesn’t seem like just some crazy fool. Looking at the attached materials, he’s got real evidence.”
“Wait a second. He’s saying the redemption delay might not be because it’s taking time to liquidate assets, but because there are no assets left?”
“He’s even calling on the Financial Supervisory Service to investigate, saying Primus Fund bought privately placed bonds from unlisted companies.”
“He’s seriously out of his mind.”
At this point, it wasn’t just a caution report. If the content turned out to be false, it wouldn’t end with someone getting fired from the company. At that point, he would have nothing to say even if he were sued for spreading false information.
“Can we run this as an article?”
“First we need to ask DA Securities and figure out what’s going on.”
“Wouldn’t they obviously say it’s false?”
“Even so, it’s better than publishing the wrong thing and then getting bombarded with complaints, filing apologies, and running corrections.”
As he was thinking that, Manager Lee Yong-min rushed over in a panic.
“What are you doing? A report exposing the insolvency of the Primus Fund just went up. Write the article now. It has to go out one second before everyone else’s.”
“What? Is this really true?”
“I’m not sure, but it sounds like the editor-in-chief knows something.”
If the order had come from the editor-in-chief, then there was definitely solid information behind it.
“Are we really allowed to run it? Last time we wrote that piece about the consumer dispute at Dae-yeon Insurance, the Dae-yeon Group threw a fit and threatened to pull all their ads.”
The media lived on advertisers’ money, not on the love of its subscribers. That was why it was so hard to publish articles critical of chaebol groups.
“It seems like it’s already been cleared. Hurry up and write it, then send it to me right away.”
“Right, got it.”
Min Hong-soo immediately started writing the article.