Chapter 8 - The Company I Thought I Owned
By midnight, my chief financial officer was in the hospital conference room with three laptops and a face I had never seen before.
Fear.
Mercer Food Holdings carried debt from two warehouse expansions and a distribution-center purchase. I knew that.
What I did not know was that several loans had been quietly reassigned.
The lender holding nearly forty percent of our secured debt was Northline Asset Partners.
The same shell company tied to Mark’s address.
“That’s impossible,” I said.
My CFO shook his head. “The assignments are valid on paper.”
“Who approved them?”
He pulled up scanned authorizations.
My electronic signature.
Again.
Fraud had been running through my life like wiring inside the walls.
“And Vanessa?” Ortiz asked him through the screen.
“She was supposed to receive enough from the sale to clear her debts.”
“Who gets the company?”
Peter stared down.
“That’s the part I never knew.”
I slammed my palm on the table.
“You expect us to believe that?”
“I knew Northline was bigger than Vanessa. That’s all.”
Claire suddenly sat straighter.
“Lucas knew.”
Everyone looked at her.
“When they argued outside the room, Vanessa called him a coward. Lucas said, ‘He’ll bury both of us when he gets control.’”
“Who is he?” Ortiz asked.
“I never heard the name.”
The conference-room door opened.
Mark stepped inside.
He had come from the company office.
His face was gray.
“I think I know.”
He placed an old photograph on the table.
It showed my father at a groundbreaking ceremony twenty years earlier.
Beside him stood a man I had not seen since my father’s funeral.
Graham Voss.
My father’s former business partner.
The man my father had forced out of the company for stealing.
Mark pointed to a recent corporate filing.
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Northline Asset Partners had one hidden beneficial owner disclosed in a sealed lender document.
Graham Voss.
