Alexander Lebedev, a financial spy carefully planted by the KGB in Britain, was a brilliant man who was already studying for a doctorate at the International Institute of Economics of the Socialist System in Moscow at the age of 22, while Seryosha was still working on his undergraduate diploma at Leningrad University.
As one of the elite of young Soviet scholars, the KGB sent him to London, the heart of capitalism, to serve his country.
When he entered the City of London as a Russian-Jew, he soon began to make a name for himself in the British investment community, and just a few years ago Bedev made a fortune by buying and selling high-risk bonds in Africa and South America, and successfully won the favor of Rothschild, an old European investment bank, and became a Rothschild investment expert in the European government bond market.
Alexander Lebedev was both a spy and one of the few Soviet experts who understood Western financial markets.
The KGB would not easily use such a talent when he did not have a particularly important and urgent task, and once it was activated, the KGB's efforts for so many years on Lebedev would be in vain.
At this moment, Seryosha naturally can't care so much, he must find enough investment for the Leningrad Special Economic Zone, so a person who has extraordinary experience in the British financial circle and can stand alone must stand up and follow Seryosha's instructions and act as a puppet of Seryosha's plan, Lebedev is the most suitable in all respects.
When Lebedev received orders from his upline for the Muddy Waters plan, he resigned from the Rothschild Bank on the instructions of his superiors and left for Switzerland.
And there was a company called Muddy Waters Finance.
He then had a new liaison with his superiors, whose first task he was to investigate the debts of the Seibu Group, Japan's largest commercial real estate company.
Lebedev was very surprised when he heard this order, he thought that he would be sent to Switzerland to join some international organization to serve as the eyes and ears of the Soviet Union, but he did not expect that his superiors would let him come to Switzerland to study Japanese commercial real estate companies.
What the hell is going on, although Lebedev does not understand the intentions of his superiors, he still chooses to carry out honestly.
Although he had just arrived in Switzerland, he was familiar with how to set up a financial research company, which was much easier than when he had studied the economic situation of various countries at the International Institute of Economics of the Socialist System in Moscow, and corporate debt was much simpler than national debt.
Because there are too many uncontrollable factors in government bonds, and many countries are secretive about their own economic data, it is actually very difficult to analyze the safety of some emerging market government bonds, while corporate bonds are much easier to study because of financial supervision reasons, because there is a lot of public information to read.
Seibu Group, Japan's iconic commercial real estate company, couldn't have been more detailed in its public profile, after all, it is a publicly traded company that is required to provide its investors with real, rigorously audited financial reports every quarter.
According to the financial report of the Seibu Group, this commercial real estate company with operations in Japan, Europe and the United States is building luxury hotels, golf courses, ski resorts and other luxury projects around the world, and most of his funds come from Japanese bank loans, and its total liabilities have long far exceeded the existing assets, which is usually very dangerous, but Japan's strong real estate market and stock market have allowed the Freak of the Seibu Group to survive.
According to the Seibu Group's financial report, their new ski resort in Switzerland has been profitable in the first year.
Lebedev drove alone to the resort that appeared in the Seibu Group's financial report, but found that the actual situation here was not the same as the description of the Seibu Group, there were almost no tourists in the ski resort in front of him, and there were not even any holiday villas here, except for a few cabins on the top of the mountain, there were no buildings at all, and there were no ski lifts here.
It is clear that Seibu lied to its shareholders about the ski resort project in Switzerland.
Although this kind of thing can be distinguished from the fake at a glance, but the investors of the Seibu Group are mainly in Japan, and how many people will fly to Switzerland to see if the ski resort in Seibu is consistent with the description in the financial report?
Lebedev quickly reported the matter to his superiors, and within a day, he instructed him to find a way to stab the matter in the name of Muddy Waters Research Company to the British financial media, and then continue to dig into the Seibu Group to see if it has any similar fraud.
Lebedev didn't understand why the KGB was holding on to the finances of the Seibu group, but he still carried out the orders of his superiors seriously.
Lebedev soon published his first report on the Seibu group through his acquaintances in England in a medium-sized newspaper in London, and also sent a copy of the same to the Japanese press.
Lebedev felt that his report would not even make a splash, and that the total assets of the Seibu Group were so huge that this small ski resort project in Switzerland could not even be compared.
So after sending out the report, Lebedev went with his staff to review other projects of the Seibu Group.
This financial analysis was quickly published in England, and as Lebedev had estimated, he did not make any waves, and no one seemed to care about it at all.
In Japan, the story was dismissed by the Yomiuri Shimbun as a fake news attack on the Seibu Group, and was put into the waste paper by the newspaper's editor.
Hardly any Japanese would believe that the current business leaders of Japan, the country's most successful businessmen for thousands of years, would cheat on their finances.
Seibu Group's shares hit new highs on the Tokyo Stock Exchange before Friday's close, and everything seemed to confirm that the story was a false accusation and that the Swiss company called Muddy Waters Research had no value at all.
But when the Tokyo Stock Exchange closed on Monday afternoon, Lebedev's research report, which had been thrown into the waste paper heap, was picked up by the editors of the Yomiuri Shimbun and published on the front page of the next day, and then frantically reprinted by major Japanese media.
All of a sudden, almost all stock investors in Japan knew about the name of Muddy Waters. t1706231537: