I cracked open a fortune cookie with a family group after dinner. My loved ones got warm, inspiring messages such as my son’s: ‘You will be successful in business and society’. Nice.
I got this one: “Friends come and go, but enemies accumulate.”
By coincidence, I had already drafted a longish blog post which detailed (and I mean detailed) the skulduggery of the most dishonest person whom it had been my misfortune to encounter in business for a long time.
Sure, some deals go wrong, and assurances made turn out to be unfulfilled, – for whatever ‘reason’ – and promises are broken. But I had concluded early on that this guy was crooked – he was, I quickly came to see, a cold-blooded liar and fantasist.
As the weeks elapsed since we concluded the deal, more and more of his dodgy AF actions have been exposed – to me and my advisors and various professionals. More skeletons in closets have been discovered, despite this man (and his co-conspirator spouse) taking extraordinary steps to try to cover their tracks.
In a remarkable series of events, material and information which I am certain they were trying hard to destroy (or at least conceal), found its way into our hands. Their fumbled efforts failed.
The thing is, I could fill you in on all this in excruciating detail here at The Paepae, as I fully intended to, and (to use accountant Matthew Gilligan’s memorable phrase) try ‘to remove this guy from the business gene pool’.
But read that fortune cookie. That’s given me food for thought.
I also recall the main lesson I learned from the last time I was engaged in (legal) warfare with a lying, malignant narcissist. I learned then that any engagement prolongs your pain. You might ‘win’ as we did, but looking back, it is far better to extract the best you can from a situation early, and END IT.
Then do not re-engage.
On that score, I heard that a large-ish payment was suddenly received by some of his victims, I think in anticipation of a tribunal hearing.
Normally narcissists, believing they are the smartest people in any room, are convinced they can outsmart any person, or body, in any venue seeking to review their actions. In this case, it seems the breaches the wretch had made were so fundamental, so thoroughly documented (partly thanks to the information which came to us, tsk ), and they exposed him to so much potential legal jeopardy, his advisors apparently got him to capitulate – although he won’t see it in those terms, naturally.
Anyway, as it stands, my exposure to his malfeasance is limited to now rectifying problems caused by his disgraceful neglect and poor maintenance of an asset that he used to own, but now we do.
I don’t need any more enemies.
– P
PS I found this in my drafts folder, from two years ago. I’d forgotten all about it. That’s pretty good, isn’t it?
Working?
Good to see you’re still doing this, Peter.