The Hwaan Group’s Bastard (3)
I explained it to him.
“That place is Grantsville, Utah. The grade is three degrees and the stretch is two miles. You could just push a car and it would run about sixty miles an hour—roughly ninety-six kilometers per hour.”
This time, I played a different video.
Against the same backdrop, this one showed an SUV driving along the road.
“One of our staff members went there and filmed it. What do you think? It looks like it’s driving, right? In reality, it was just left in neutral and rolled downhill. Doesn’t it move exactly the same as the video from before?”
For a moment, Heo Min-woong looked dumbfounded, then seemed to remember something.
“Then what about the truck onstage? Don’t tell me that was downhill too?”
“Ah! That one was powered by running a wire from underneath the stage to the truck and driving a motor with it. Think of it as a wired RC car.”
I showed him a still photo I’d captured from the event footage.
Seeing the cable snaking out beneath the truck, he let out a hollow laugh.
“Ha... ”
He probably thought I was spouting nonsense.
Even saying it out loud, I felt like I was the one talking nonsense.
Who would ever imagine a company worth forty billion dollars in market cap would pull a stunt like this at a public event?
This time, I brought up another photo.
“This is the hydrogen vehicle factory they said they were building in Mississippi. They announced it a year ago, and they still haven’t even broken ground. When exactly are they planning to build the plant, and when are they going to mass-produce hydrogen cars?”
“That part was with GM and—”
“Ah, the partnership with GM?”
GM had agreed to acquire a twelve percent stake in Thomas.
The deal was that they would contribute parts like electric batteries in kind rather than paying cash, while Thomas and GM would co-develop the hydrogen truck and GM would handle production.
After the MOU announcement, Thomas Motors’ stock price had surged by more than fifty percent.
“As you know, an MOU has no binding force at all. GM hasn’t invested a single dollar in Thomas yet. If they discover a problem during due diligence, they can walk away whenever they want.”
And in fact, once the fraud came to light, GM scrapped its plan to take a stake altogether. In the end, only the Hwaan Group got burned.
“CEO Brad Button sold out the Hwaan Group during the GM MOU negotiations. When GM said they wanted to do due diligence, he boasted that if they had no technology, how could they have possibly partnered with the Hwaan Group? I’m sure he said exactly the same thing during this latest negotiation with Hwaan Energy. He probably told you that if they didn’t have the technology, would GM really be buying shares? Am I wrong?”
“...”
The fact that he couldn’t answer told me he’d already heard the exact same line.
That was how you deceived the many. Ironically, the people who’d been fooled ended up becoming the swindler’s guarantors.
“Are you really saying Thomas doesn’t have the technology to make hydrogen vehicles?”
“Yes.”
In truth, building an electric car wasn’t that hard. The structure was simple enough that anyone could make one if they bought a battery and a motor.
That was why even small startups were able to launch electric vehicles.
But hydrogen cars were far more complex than EVs, and not just anyone could build them.
A fuel cell was essentially a small generator.
Unlike an electric vehicle, where you could just drop in a battery, a hydrogen car needed a high-pressure hydrogen tank and a fuel cell stack.
It also needed a radiator to reduce the heat generated in the process of producing electricity.
Since it took serious technical skill, only three companies in the world had actually succeeded in mass-producing hydrogen cars.
One of them was Daeyun Motors in Korea.
“Thomas said it had succeeded in developing the fuel cell stack and high-pressure hydrogen tank, which are the core of a hydrogen vehicle. And yet, it kept proposing partnerships to Daeyun Motors over and over. For infrastructure, it could work with the Hwaan Group. For production, it could work with GM. So what exactly was it clinging to Daeyun Motors for?”
“...”
Lie always hid inside a sliver of truth.
What was astonishing was that Thomas Motors really had intended to build hydrogen cars. Lacking the technology, yes, but if you had money, you could buy almost anything.
Fortunately, Thomas Motors had enough capital, thanks to having drawn in investment by painting a rosy future for so long.
CEO Brad Button must have had a plan of his own.
He would take the core technology from Daeyun Motors, hand production over to GM, and leave the hydrogen infrastructure to the Hwaan Group.
If Daeyun Motors had accepted the offer, they might actually have been able to turn lies into truth.
But despite multiple rounds of courtship, Daeyun Motors rejected Thomas’s offer, and Thomas failed to secure the core technology it needed for hydrogen cars.
That was why, to this day, it still couldn’t build a hydrogen truck.
“For reference, the inverter and motor they claimed were developed in-house were actually bought from a German company called Carmen. You can verify that for yourself.”
Unlike GM, which had only signed an MOU, or Daeyun Motors, which had refused to cooperate, the Hwaan Group was moving toward an actual investment.
Once a large-scale investment began, it would become that much harder to pull out.
I looked at Heo Min-woong and said, “There’s a new vehicle announcement planned for Pure Cell Day. If you don’t believe me, then take a close look at the T2 FCV they’re unveiling this time. See whether that car is truly in a drivable state. I guarantee they won’t even let you inspect the interior, making one excuse after another.”
He said nothing for a long time.
By now, his head must have been in complete turmoil. He was probably wondering whether he should believe me or not.
After a while, he finally spoke, his face hardening.
“What do you want?”
“What do I want?”
“Why go to all this trouble and come all the way here just to tell me this?”
Of course.
Did he really think I was out here trying to save some stranger’s life for free? I was doing all this for my own benefit.
“First, check whether what I’m saying is true. We can talk in detail after that. Ah—and I’d postpone the agreement for as long as possible if I were you.”
With that, I placed my business card on the table and stood up.
“I’ll be going now. Thanks for the drink.”
Han Miru left as if he had said everything he came to say.
Left alone, Heo Min-woong sank into his thoughts.
For the entire time they’d faced each other, anger had burned in his chest, but at some point, his mind had gone cold.
What came back to him then was what Chairman Yoo Jae-ho had said to him.
“I don’t know what you’ll talk about when you meet, but if you listen carefully, it will definitely help you. It helped me too.”
He had fixated on that last line.
What exactly had Chairman Yoo Jae-ho heard from Han Miru?
If things go well, my brother takes the credit, and if they go wrong, I have to take the fall?
The first possibility was already something he had worried about himself, so he had been keeping an eye on it. But if Han Miru was right, then it wasn’t even something he needed to worry about in the first place.
Thomas Motors was currently being evaluated as a company with enormous future value.
If Tisla had taken over the EV market, everyone believed without question that Thomas would dominate the hydrogen-car market.
That expectation alone had pushed it past Ford’s market cap, and now it was threatening GM’s.
And all of that is a scam?
Heo Min-woong looked over the materials Han Miru had left behind once more. Now that he’d started doubting it, there were definitely plenty of strange things.
Brad Button’s past behavior was shocking enough, but the most shocking part of all was that the hydrogen truck hadn’t actually been driven—it had been rolled down a hill.
Why did nobody know this?
If this report was true, then what would happen? Who would be responsible for the bad investment?
If the hydrogen infrastructure agreement collapsed, the Hwaan Group’s entire energy roadmap would have to be redrawn from scratch.
In truth, reports pointing out Thomas’s instability could be found easily enough. But the same had once been true of Tisla.
Any company challenging a new industry was always met with both expectations and concerns.
Tisla had silenced every one of those concerns and opened the age of electric vehicles. Could Thomas really do the same?
Until just before coming to America, he had believed it would. But now, he wasn’t sure.
However he went about it, he needed to confirm whether the man’s words were true first.
After finishing my business in Alabama, I headed straight back to San Francisco.
The staff members I’d sent out all over the place had already returned and were gathered together.
“How did it go?”
“I met him. That’s all.”
By now, suspicion must have been filling his head.
“Do you think he’ll move the way we want?”
“Of course. The more someone has, the more afraid they are of losing it.”
Heo Min-woong had been born a chaebol heir.
No matter what happened, he would never want to lose that position. Just to survive, he’d move exactly the way I wanted him to.
I looked at David and the others and said, “We’re going to blow this open all at once to coincide with Pure Cell Day.”
“How much are you planning to invest?”
“For now, everything we have.”
Continue Capital’s cash reserves currently stood at 107 million dollars.
If I was going to do this right, I needed to gather as much cash as possible.
I started by selling off the Dongwoo Precision warrants I held.
The Dongwoo Precision bonds I’d bought were BW bonds—bonds with warrants. At maturity, you could receive new shares at a predetermined price, in addition to the interest and principal.
The subscription price for the new shares was 12,000 won.
But before trading was halted, the stock had been at 6,580 won. Naturally, the warrants were practically worthless.
Then trading resumed after Yuseong Electronics acquired the company, and the stock soared limit-up day after day, now standing at 35,000 won—more than five times higher.
If I bought the warrants and took the new shares, I’d make a profit of 23,000 won per share at the current price. But since the shares weren’t immediately deliverable, they were actually trading at about twenty percent less than that.
Because the stock was expected to keep rising, the warrants sold easily enough.
The sale brought in 22.6 billion won—roughly twenty million dollars.
Still not enough.
Just as I was thinking about other ways to raise money, my phone rang from an unknown number.
“Hello?”
“Is this Han Miru’s phone?”
“Yes, it is. Who’s calling?”
“Hello. I’m Tyler Park, CEO of GTiger PE.”
I’d never heard of the company, and I’d never heard of the man either. Still, with PE attached to the name, it had to be a private equity firm, right?
“What can I do for you?”
“I’m calling because I’d like to invest in your company.”
“How much are we talking?”
“One hundred million dollars.”
He didn’t say who had introduced him, and I didn’t ask who had referred me to him either.
He’d said one hundred million dollars, but I hadn’t actually expected him to invest for real.
I probably should’ve asked for more.
“We’ll send the contract over by email on our end.”
I immediately asked David to draft one up.
At the news that we were receiving a one-hundred-million-dollar investment, he was stunned.
“One hundred million dollars? Who on earth is investing?”
“Someone I know.”
It was a shame I couldn’t tell him the name, since this was slush money.
The term was fifteen days. The fee was half the profits. And if there were losses, I’d be responsible for them.
In truth, even if I said I’d take responsibility, if I couldn’t pay, that was that. Did he really think I was worried about being eaten alive?
Of course, if that happened, he wouldn’t exactly get to enjoy a pleasant ending.
The Yuseong Group dominated not only the business world but Korean society as a whole. If it wanted to, it could easily bury one person socially.
Maybe it could even bury them physically...
Well, whatever.
As long as I didn’t blow it, that was all that mattered.