College Classmate (2)
By around midnight, the mood had naturally begun to wind down.
Only college students could drink until dawn. Jin Se-yeon was off to one side, chatting with someone over text, and the girls nearby immediately latched onto it.
“Oh! Someone’s coming to pick you up because he’s close by? Who is it?”
“Wait, your boyfriend?”
“Ooh, Jin Se-yeon’s got a man?”
Jin Se-yeon shook her head.
“What boyfriend? He’s just an older guy I know.”
“He’s coming to pick you up? Then you must be dating.”
“I said we’re not.”
“What does he do?”
When her friends all asked at once, Jin Se-yeon gave in and answered.
“He works at his father’s company right now.”
“What company is that?”
“Primus Asset Management. I think his father’s a vice president there.”
It might have sounded unfamiliar to ordinary people, but since we were all economics majors, everyone knew the name Primus.
“Whoa, Primus!”
“They’ve been huge lately.”
“Primus? Private equity?”
“Isn’t it the hottest private equity firm right now?”
“Aren’t they famous for paying huge bonuses?”
“The vice president’s son? That’s insane.”
“How did you meet him?”
As soon as the conversation turned to dating, the attention shifted in that direction.
“Call him over for a second.”
“I want to see what kind of guy he is.”
Choi Han-byeol nudged Ha Gyeong-tae in the ribs.
“You confessed to Se-yeon once before, didn’t you?”
Ha Gyeong-tae looked flustered.
“Come on, that was ages ago.”
Then the others immediately started teasing him.
“Right. He got drunk and confessed to her.”
“He didn’t even come to class for two days after she turned him down.”
“I thought he’d taken a leave of absence.”
Ha Gyeong-tae pointed at me.
“Weren’t you one of the guys who confessed to Se-yeon too, Miru?”
...
Why the hell was he dragging me into this?
Jin Se-yeon looked at me with a smile on her face.
I took a sip of my drink and said, “Yeah. I did.”
I must have really liked her back then, but now it didn’t feel like anything at all. I really had been away for a long time.
A little while later.
A man in his late twenties, wearing silver-rimmed glasses, appeared.
“Hello. I hope I’m not interrupting your night with your friends.”
He was of average height and had ordinary features, but his skin was clear and his face had a pleasant, trustworthy quality. Confidence and caution both seemed to come naturally to him in the way he carried himself and spoke.
He introduced himself and handed out a business card.
Primus Asset Management
Head of the Overseas Bond Team
The card said Primus Asset Management and Head of the Overseas Bond Team.
My friends immediately began asking him questions.
“Whoa! If you’re a team leader, you must know a lot about investing.”
“I just started investing in stocks recently. Are there any good ones these days?”
“Does Primus not hire new employees?”
“If I wanted to get into private equity….”
They fired off question after question, and he answered each one politely.
At a glance, he looked like nothing more than a solid, respectable man. That was one of the common traits of frauds: they never looked like the type who would scam anyone.
Right now, the minimum investment for the Primus Fund was 100 million won, but two years later it would be lowered to 10 million.
Because they had built trust by posting steady, reliable returns for years, plenty of people invested in it, until it became a fund the whole country knew about.
And among the people sitting here, three of them would end up putting in a substantial amount of money after believing every word this bastard said.
Park Jeong-yeon asked, “Are you dating Se-yeon?”
At that question, Jin Se-yeon quickly waved her hands.
“I told you, he’s just a close older friend.”
That was true enough. They weren’t dating yet. They would later, though.
Compared to the rest of us, who were still just starting out in society, Lim Jun-il looked like a grown man. Back in my first life, he’d seemed enormous, but now he just looked like someone of average build.
Once again, I was reminded that people changed depending on where you stood.
In the warm, lively atmosphere, I said to him, “I’m actually working on a report about the Primus Fund right now, and I was wondering if I could ask you a few questions.”
“A report?”
“Yes. I work as an RA at DA Securities.”
“Ah! I see.”
“It’s my first time writing one, so I want to do a good job.”
Lim Jun-il nodded readily.
“Ask me anything. You’re Se-yeon’s friend, so of course I should help.”
“Most investment products lose profitability when they’re stable, but the Primus Fund seems different.”
“That’s the biggest strength of the Primus Fund. There are probably only a few places in the world like our company that can generate returns this steadily.”
He wore his confidence well.
“Actually, that’s what I’m a little suspicious about.”
“Suspicious?”
“Even while bond funds have been getting crushed lately, Primus has still been producing stable, high returns. Even compared with other funds that invest only in triple-A rated bonds, the numbers are too high.”
When the other classmates heard that, they chimed in.
“Come on, what’s so weird about that?”
“If the returns are good, isn’t that a good thing?”
“What’s the problem?”
Lim Jun-il smiled.
“This is the first time I’ve heard someone say a fund is a problem because the returns are too good. We simply select only the safest bonds with the best rates and invest in those.”
“That’s strange. Stability and profitability usually move in opposite directions. Bonds like that wouldn’t just be lying around on the market. Maybe temporarily, but could that really be sustainable over the long term?”
His eyes changed slightly.
“What exactly are you trying to say?”
“I’m wondering whether some of the assets are being invested elsewhere.”
At this point, I had no way of knowing how deeply he was involved in the company’s affairs, but if he had a brain in his head, he’d at least know there were bad assets in there and that money was being siphoned off somewhere else.
“What are you talking about?”
“I actually heard a rumor recently that there might be some rotten assets in the Primus Fund.”
For a moment, his expression twitched.
Unlike two years and six months from now, at this point only a handful of people, including Sung Yoon-ah and me, had even begun to suspect the truth.
Of course, there were no rumors yet.
Lim Jun-il openly looked displeased.
“Where on earth did you hear such nonsense?”
After the Primus scandal broke, he fled overseas with Vice President Lim Tae-hoon, was later extradited back to Korea, and ended up receiving a three-year prison sentence after the embezzlement charges stuck.
He pocketed hundreds of billions of won and got only three years.
No wonder fraudsters ran wild in this country.
Sensing that the atmosphere was getting worse, my friends tried to rein me in.
“Hey, hey, what’s wrong with you?”
“Miru, I think you’re pretty drunk.”
Ha Gyeong-tae joked, “What, do you still like Se-yeon or something?”
...
This asshole really never learned how to read the room.
I ignored him and kept going.
“As you know, there have been a lot of fraud cases in the financial sector lately. There are scams everywhere. So I’m being extra careful while writing this report.”
At my words, his face stiffened.
“A fraudster? Are you talking about me right now?”
I took the beer left in my glass and said, “Wouldn’t dream of it. You’re not feeling guilty about anything, are you?”
Lim Jun-il’s expression twisted, and then Jin Se-yeon shot to her feet and shouted at me.
“Hey! Han Miru! Cut it out!”
For a moment, everything around us went silent.
I looked around.
Everyone was staring at me in shock. They had come to celebrate, so I probably looked like a complete lunatic.
Judging from Jin Se-yeon’s face, she was really angry.
There was no point saying any more here. In the end, everyone would find out I was right soon enough anyway.
Either way, I had said what I came to say.
I gathered up my things and stood.
“I think I got drunk and said something stupid. I’ll head out first.”
I left the bar and was going down the stairs when I heard a woman’s voice behind me.
“Did you really have to do that at a celebration?”
Turning around, I saw Jiyu standing there.
With her brows raised, she said in a sharp voice, “I hope you at least apologize to unnie for tonight someday.”
Was she mad?
More than scary, she just seemed cute.
I gave a small snort of laughter.
“Why are you laughing?”
“No reason.”
She looked like she was always sweet and harmless on TV, but apparently she had quite a temper.
I said to her, “Wait a week.”
“Pardon?”
“If you still think I was wrong then, call me and I’ll apologize.”
She looked thoroughly confused.
“You seriously did that because you think that guy’s a fraud?”
I asked, dumbfounded, “Then what, you think I did it out of jealousy? Do I really seem that pathetic to you?”
Jiyu waved her hands.
“No, I mean, not like that, but….”
Not like that, huh? She’d clearly been thinking it.
She had an entertainer’s image to protect, but the fact that she was talking to me like this meant she really did care about Se-yeon.
Impressed that she was looking out for her cousin, I gave her a bit of advice.
“If you can help it, don’t do the C-Lab feature.”
At my abrupt change of subject, her eyes went round.
“Pardon? What do you mean?”
“I heard it from an analyst who handles entertainment stuff. The rumors aren’t good. There are even people calling him trash.”
“What rumors?”
“He’s got some woman trouble. It looks like it’ll blow up within a few months, so if you don’t want to end up getting burned for no reason, you’d better keep your distance.”
At my words, she bit her lip slightly.
“What gives you the right to talk so carelessly about other people?”
Even this probably just sounded like me bad-mouthing an innocent man. Whether she believed me or not was her choice.
“We’ll see whether I’m right or wrong.”
After Han Miru left, the friends all stared after him in surprise.
“What’s wrong with him?”
“Why’s he picking a fight out of nowhere?”
“What does an RA like him even think he knows?”
“He looks really drunk.”
“Did he really do that because he still likes Se-yeon?”
Listening to them, Jiyu got up right away and said she should head out too.
Ha Gyeong-tae turned to Lim Jun-il.
“Miru’s just drunk, so don’t take it too seriously.”
“I’m fine.”
Lim Jun-il forced himself to sound calm, but that was not how he really felt.
What on earth does that guy know?
Contrary to the public story, Primus was investing in toxic assets and siphoning off the profits through shell companies.
But only a few people in the company knew that.
To be honest, even he didn’t know the full scale of it. He only knew that a portion of the assets were being handled that way.
He said he was a new employee, didn’t he?
Because Primus Fund was so famous, rumors about it were everywhere. Good news and bad news alike always swarmed the market.
The kind of information a newcomer could pick up was obvious enough.
From the way everyone else was talking, he could roughly piece together the situation.
He probably just heard some rumor somewhere and stitched it together to look smart in front of a girl.
There was no need to report this little episode.
Before long, Lim Jun-il simply erased Han Miru’s words from his mind.