He said, "And you can't lead something you don't fully understand," he looked at her. "And because the way I operate, the reason I built what I built the way I built it is that I believe the right information should be in the right hands, even when it's uncomfortable information." She looked at him for a long moment. Even when the hands dropped money on a marble floor, she said. He held her gaze. Yes, he said.
Even then, the board meeting was called for the following morning. 11 People around a table that had been the seat of Caldwell Horizon's decision-making for 30 years. Seven of them had been there for at least a decade. They had hired Victoria. Some of them had interviewed Adrien Cole and voted to approve his promotion.
They were people believed they understood the company they governed. Damian let his attorneys present the findings. All of them. Every subsidiary, every shell entity, every payment routing, every communication with the offshore firm, every detail of the technology transfer plan. The forensic accounting report was 63 pages and was presented without summary because summary allows for selective attention and selective attention was exactly how this had gone undiscovered for 26 months.
The board members read. They asked questions. Damian answered them directly and without hedging because hedging in this context would have been a form of protection for people who did not deserve protection. One of the board members, a man named Thomas Garrett, 63 years old, who had been on this board for 14 years and had the particular self asssurance of someone who has been right often enough to stop questioning whether he might be wrong, said about 40 minutes into the meeting, I want to understand how this wasn't caught by our internal audit process. Damian said because your internal audit process was structured below the threshold that would trigger detection that was intentional.
The structure was designed specifically around your existing controls. Thomas said that's a failure of our audit infrastructure. Yes, Damen said it is. Then we need to discuss accountability. We will.
Damian said, but I'd suggest we discuss it in the correct order. First, the scope of what happened. Second, the immediate protective actions for the company and its employees. Third, the structural reforms. And fourth, accountability at the governance level.
He paused. If we skip to four, we miss everything that makes four meaningful. Thomas looked at him across the table. You've done this before, Thomas said. Not accusatory.
Reading him. I've been in rooms where the wrong thing happened because everyone went to the comfortable conversation first. Damian said, "I prefer the other order." The meeting lasted 4 hours. At the end of it, the board voted unanimously to authorize the full cooperation with the federal investigation to appoint an independent oversight committee and to initiate the emergency protocols that would protect the technology platform and freeze any remaining unauthorized access. Thomas Garrett on his way out stopped next to Damian and said, "I owe you an acknowledgement." "You don't," Damian said.