The Primus Scandal (4)
There was one more person who was stunned by the article.
Jiyu felt as if she’d been struck in the head.
Was what he said that day really true?
She remembered the last piece of advice he had given her.
He told me not to do the feature with Seelab’s senior, right? That a scandal involving a woman would break out before long?
After hearing that, she had done her own digging on Seelab, just in case.
Maybe it was because of management under the big agency TM Entertainment, but for all seven years of their activity they had never been seriously dragged through the mud.
He was said to have a good personality and to be kind to the people around him.
Featuring on Seelab’s solo track was a huge opportunity for a rookie like her.
From the moment she first heard it, she’d had a feeling it would be a hit, and that she would ride that success to a surge in popularity as well.
She hadn’t signed the contract yet, but she’d already told them she was in.
And yet…
For some reason, his words just wouldn’t leave her alone.
What the hell does he know about the entertainment industry?
She could accept that he’d spotted the fund’s problems because that was his field, but could he really have gotten the entertainment issue right too?
But there had been certainty in his expression and his voice. Which meant he knew something she didn’t.
Jiyu bit her lip lightly.
What am I supposed to do?
After a long period of agonizing, she made up her mind.
After work, Lee Dong-ho met up with colleagues from headquarters and the branch office for drinks.
Before anyone had even emptied their glass, they were already firing off questions about what had happened.
“How’s the atmosphere at headquarters these days?”
“Basically a funeral home.”
The incident that had unfolded in the research department that day had spread everywhere, dragging Yang Jeong-uk’s reputation through the mud.
The people who heard about it through Lee Dong-ho, who had been there himself, were utterly floored.
“Whoa! You’re telling me a new hire yelled at the heir apparent and told him to take responsibility?”
“This isn’t some scene from a drama.”
“And yet the rookie was right in the end.”
“But how the hell did he find out about the Primus Fund problem?”
“Was it really true that he spotted the issue while writing a recommendation report?”
“Does that even make sense? Primus was considered one of the top three asset managers, and they were using client assets to pull off a fraud.”
“So Yang Jeong-uk is the one who has to take the fall?”
“Looks like even the chairman can’t cover for him.”
“Then what happens to the succession?”
“Isn’t he basically done for?”
The Primus Fund scandal was, without exaggeration, the worst fraud in the history of private funds. Even under the most conservative estimate, the securities firm’s losses would reach four hundred billion won.
They’d been sent there to rack up performance, and instead they’d detonated a gigantic disaster. If the seller had done even a halfway decent job of supervision, the thing never would have exploded like this.
No matter that he was the chairman’s son, he was finished as a candidate for the top spot in the financial group.
“So what happens to the next chairman?”
“Who knows. Maybe he’ll keep his head down for a while and then crawl back once people forget.”
“And you think Executive Director Yang Ja-eun will just sit still in the meantime? I heard from a classmate that things inside the group are getting ugly. Even the current executives are jumping to her side.”
“At this rate, the heir might actually change.”
Vice Chairman Yang Ja-eun stepped forward to replace the aging Chairman Yang Hyeon-seong and the embattled Yang Jeong-uk.
She calmed the turmoil inside the group and took active measures to respond to the crisis.
Her swift handling of the situation stood in stark contrast to Yang Jeong-uk’s, and it drew people’s attention.
With the heir seeming likely to change, some people even started whispering that Executive Director Yang Ja-eun had engineered the whole thing herself.
Lee Dong-ho fell briefly into thought.
Does this have something to do with Miru too? No way. Right?
He took a sip of beer and said, “Well, he brought it on himself. It was going to blow up sooner or later anyway.”
“Exactly. Better that it exploded early.”
Each branch had been enthusiastically hawking the Primus Fund. If the fraud had gone undetected any longer, the damage would have been even worse.
“Shouldn’t they give your junior a bonus of a few hundred million won or something?”
“Like hell they would.”
Because of the report that rookie had filed, they’d been able to reduce the scale of the damage.
But if anyone thought the company would praise an employee for that, they didn’t understand corporate life at all.
Corporations put principle above profit.
Even when something was wrong, you were supposed to report it up the chain and handle it according to policy and procedure. Exposing it on your own was no different from whistleblowing.
And corporations hated whistleblowers with a pathological intensity.
In fact, a lot of executives were furious that he’d needlessly blown up something that could have been handled quietly inside the company.
Not just Yang Jeong-uk, but everyone on his side would be grinding their teeth at Han Miru.
What Han Miru had done was unquestionably right, morally and for the company. At the same time, it had brought him absolutely no personal benefit.
But why was Miru so desperate about it?
It was easy to say you’d stand alone and call something wrong when everyone else was saying it was right, but unless you had a level of conviction and courage most people didn’t possess, it was impossible.
Really, there was nothing else to say except that he was incredible.
He didn’t used to be that kind of person, did he? Come to think of it, he does seem a little different lately.
Lee Dong-ho gave a bitter smile. “He already submitted his resignation letter.”
The mood at the company was far from good, to put it mildly.
The victims gathered outside headquarters to protest, and emergency executive meetings were called day after day to discuss countermeasures.
Complaints poured in from every direction, and the press hammered them relentlessly every single day.
The next day after everything happened, I still went to work.
Unlike before, when I’d been frantic and buried in work, there wasn’t much for me to do.
It wasn’t just me; the entire research department had been brought to a standstill. Who would trust a report from us now?
Everyone looked distinctly worried that the company might be about to go under. A few employees were already scrambling to find new jobs.
The loss was huge, but if the group stepped in to support it, it wasn’t at the point where the firm would collapse.
Executive Director Yang Ja-eun made it clear she had no intention of abandoning DA Securities, and she worked to calm the internal unrest.
The looks aimed at me were no good either.
If they’d only whispered behind my back, that would’ve been one thing. But some people deliberately bumped my shoulder in the hallway, and others openly bad-mouthed me right in front of me.
When I went to grab coffee, a few people from another department looked at me and sneered.
“Yeah, look at him, acting like he’s all that.”
“Who the hell does he think he is, running his mouth when he doesn’t know his place?”
“Seriously, does he not think about anyone else?”
So this was what it was like to be a whistleblower. No wonder people kept quiet about corporate wrongdoing even when they knew about it.
I turned around and walked over to them. The employees who’d been talking behind my back looked flustered, probably because they hadn’t expected me to come right at them.
I said to them, “You really don’t need to thank me so much.”
Because of me, the company hadn’t gone under, and no fire had broken out either. I’d protected both their jobs and their lives.
But the man, unaware of any of that, only got angry.
“What? What the hell are you talking about?”
“Hey, hey, calm down. What if you hit him and then he reports you to the Human Rights Commission or something?”
“Dammit. Just my luck.”
They all stormed off somewhere, grumbling.
I watched them go and let out a short laugh. Then I took one last look around the company where I’d spent my first days.
The resignation letter was processed quickly.
My tenure had been a mere six months.
Since I’d still been in the middle of learning the job, there was nothing to hand over. Naturally, there was no severance pay either.
When I’d joined, it had felt like I’d had to break through every imaginable gate just to get in. Getting out was over in an instant.
After clearing out my desk and leaving the company, I bought four beers for ten thousand won at a convenience store and sat down on a nearby bench.
I could see people in suits walking around with briefcases. They all moved quickly toward somewhere.
Until just moments ago, I had been one of them. But now I felt like a zebra that had wandered away from the herd.
Watching them made the fact that I’d become unemployed feel startlingly real.
I thought back to when I’d first joined DA Securities.
I’d wanted to become a famous trader, earn hundreds of millions of won a year, and someday become the president of the company. In the end, I’d become the owner of a chicken restaurant instead.
I was leisurely drinking beer and taking in the scenery when a call came in from an unfamiliar number.
I answered it.
“Hello?”
A middle-aged woman’s voice came through.
[I heard you quit the company today.]
“Yes. You must be busy, yet you still called.”
If she was trying to sort out the group and seize real power, she probably didn’t have enough hands no matter how many she had.
[I have one thing I’m curious about.]
“What is it?”
[How on earth did you catch the Primus Fund’s bad assets? I listened to what you said that day, but even so, I still wasn’t fully convinced until the investigation results came out.]
Well, because I’d regressed. If I hadn’t, I would’ve been completely in the dark too and just writing recommendation reports like everyone else.
I smiled and said, “Let’s just call it intuition.”
She burst out laughing.
[But are you sure it’s really okay to leave like this?]
“Yes.”
I’d done it for no one but myself. I’d prevented a catastrophe that would have happened down the line, and that left my heart lighter.
The people who remained would manage somehow on their own.
What I had to do now was outside the company, not inside it.
[If you ever need anything later on, call me anytime.]
“Understood.”
I hung up and took another sip of beer, only for a shadow to fall over me.
“Could I have one too?”
I took a can out of the bag and handed it to her.
She sat down beside me, popped the tab, and took a swig. She must have been thirsty, because she drank it in one cool gulp, like a scene from a beer commercial.
Unlike me, shouldn’t she be heading back to work?
Sung Yoon-ah settled in beside me.
“Did you really quit the company?”
“After causing an incident like that, I can’t exactly keep going in and out like nothing happened.”
“You didn’t cause the incident. You just exposed it, Miru.”
But most people wouldn’t see it that way.
“Thanks for helping me.”
“I didn’t really do much.”
“No, you helped a lot.”
Sung Yoon-ah took another drink and said, “I never expected you to meet with Vice Chairman Yang Ja-eun. Why didn’t you tell me beforehand?”
There were only a few people who knew I had met Yang Ja-eun. So how had she found out?
“Did you hear it from your mother?”
At my words, she flinched.
“W-What are you talking about?”
“Vice Chairman Yang Ja-eun is your mother.”
“What?”
“Unless she isn’t.”
She stared at me in silence for a while. Then, as if conceding defeat, she said, “How did you know?”
“After meeting Vice Chairman Yang Ja-eun in person, I just thought you two looked a lot alike. Come to think of it, her husband’s name is Sung Min-seok. I took a guess, just in case.”
It was a lie.
She didn’t look anything like her mother. Even if you put them side by side, most people probably wouldn’t guess they were mother and daughter.
The reason I knew was that about a year later, rumors had swept through the company that she was Yang Ja-eun’s daughter.
The male employees who had been hitting on her without knowing that fact had been left completely on edge, and the manager who had sent her multiple lewd messages was disciplined and demoted.
It was also true that when Yang Jeong-uk had come into the cafeteria and approached the new hires, he’d actually been trying to talk to his niece, Sung Yoon-ah.
In fact, when I’d first considered trying to meet Yang Ja-eun, I’d briefly thought about asking her for help.
The reason I hadn’t was that I’d worried it might look like I’d approached her with an agenda.
Since I’d arranged the meeting myself through my own ability, she would have found it easier to believe what I said.