Morally corrupt, but perfectly legal | Previous Challenge Entry

how it works

TITLE: Morally corrupt, but perfectly legal | Previous Challenge Entry
By alan kane
01/28/15
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Eleven months' work and two billion dollars richer and Hertger Properties have helped tens of thousands of people find a new home. Each family unit was promised one two thousand square foot property in a new modern development including twenty-four hour security and even its own fourteen screen cinema, bingo hall, three supermarkets, six children's play parks, leisure centre and commuter station, all for a small monthly charge.

Finally, last property signed up. To think two years ago the Department of Defence abandoned this base. We bought it cheap. We might be thirty four miles from the nearest city, but we have just made a new mini city.

I am the sales director for Hertger Properties. We build high spec developments at reasonable costs. Most of our properties have one hundred and eight individual units over twelve floors, including facilities. This newest construction will bring this development to forty, and complete Hertger Springs.

Sixty-three percent of new residents came from one community twenty-one miles away. We bought all their properties, churches, and business. We bought the town. Some did not want to move, but eventually did. It cost us a fortune, but then sometimes you have to invest to make money.

Long term, Hertger Springs will make us money. No one really knows how to read small print, not even lawyers. Each year, the service charges go up; nothing too great, but after a few years some will move on. However, they are signed up for life. They will have to pay ten years' worth of service charges to leave: all perfectly legal.

After today, I will be leaving Hertger Springs in the hands of a ruthless management company. I joke with my friends, "never buy a Hertger home. You might get a great home, but you give us your soul."

Normally we do not buy whole towns like we did with Leurgerd's Fall, but the opportunity arose with the death of their mayor. His family owned seventy-eight percent of the land and many properties, but wanted to move abroad. They said they were tired of looking after useless, lazy people.

When we look into properties, we also look under them, at the mineral rights.

This is where we hit the motherload. Although Hertger Properties is a major player in properties, we are owned by a silent corporation under the name of Paul Kergert Enterprises (PKE). PKE also owns a research company that created a new mineral compound, which will revolutionalise the Defence Industry. The only problem is, one of the main ingredients is extremely rare. If it had not been for PKE, Hertger Properties would not have even considered the Leurgerd family proposal.

I almost feel sorry for the Leurgerds. They sold out for eighty million(worth ninety without mineral rights). After we bought the remainder of the town for twenty four million plus the cost of 'affordable' units, bribes and enforcers to encourage the less than willing to move, the town in total cost us one hundred and forty million.

In about six months, Leurgerd's Fall will have been wiped off the face of the earth.

PKE granted me a partnership for the Leurgerd's Fall and Hertger Spring deal.

PKE understand that extracting this mineral is highly dangerous and people will get injured. We can and will stall future law suits for years. Then the subsidiary will declare bankruptcy. Then start a new company, all under PKE; we will make billions.

With this new compound now readily available, research into other uses for this compound will start. Over the next twenty years we forecast a turnover of over six hundred and forty six billion dollars, with a profit of one hundred and twenty-eight billion, of which I will earn two per cent.

The Leurgerds wanted rid of their responsibility for the town and greedily sold out for eighty million. If they had waited a few years, they would have made at least five times that. They thought they were haggling and forcing us to pay over the market value for a worthless town that would have taken years to make money from. Their greed made it so easy to complete the contracts before they realised what was happening.

Our corporation might be called greedy, polluters, even morally corrupt, but it is all perfectly legal and personally, I will be banking two billion, even after tax plus a generous salary. So thanks, Leurgerds; enjoy your money. I sure will.

Authors Note: This is totally fiction. All names mentioned are fictional and any similarity to real situations or people are coincidental.

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