Recently disgorged
THE great wine robbery hit the City hard. In broad daylight, men in green vans arrived at Greens' vaults, loaded up all the wine, took it away and were not seen again. This was the unhappy end of a City firm founded seven years before the Bank of England. Goodbye to that untidy office in the Royal Exchange, with all those bottles so conveniently left open for casual sam- pling. There have been signs of trouble — changes of control, the departure of Liz Robertson, the wine buyer, nowadays the star of Safeway — but the end came as a shock, and all the more so because much of the wine belonged not to the firm but to its City customers. They mopped their eyes and wrote it off, but the fraud squad began to ask questions. Those mysterious green vans were they Greens' vans? Could this have been an inside job? It could, and it was, and its perpetrators went inside, while the firm they had ruined fell into the hands of the liquidators at Coopers & Lybrand. Then letters began to go out to the credi- tors, asking for claims. A feat of detective work had traced some of the vans and had even found some of the wines. The liquida- tors will have paid themselves out of the assets, and I do hope they were paid in kind, but there was enough left over for a distribution to Greens' customers — which is why there appeared, on my doorstep this week, two cases of Château Chasse-Spleen 1983. That is my idea of an improbably happy ending.
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