CHINA-OCCUPIED HONG KONG – Out of spare cash but still holding on to his pecuniary wits by a thread despite being in a coke-induced Rurik Jutting-like murderstate, Hong Kong-based banker Arnaud Villeneuve turned the world of high finance on its head Friday night when he used an electronic letter of credit to pay off the HK$12,000 (US$1,500) cost of the eight bags of blow he snorted up his elegant French nose at a tony Soho nightspot.
In doing so, Villeneuve managed to leverage his firm’s latest fintech offering and storied reputation into a world first as well as a financial freebasing flambeau that left even wily veterans of Hong Kong’s international banking scene shaking their heads in delighted bewilderment.
“I’ve never really seen that before,” said Cleo Blandershot, a colleague of Villeneuve at HSBC who was with him during the epic bender. “Usually we use letters of credit for financing shipments of goods overseas and whatnot, but Arnaud took his banking and hooch-buying genius to a new level with this stunning display of fiscal engineering.”
“But you have to remember that 99 percent of letters of credit are still handled in the traditional matter – by an exchange of documents,” Blandershot said. “An electronic l/c is such a rare transaction it’s almost unheard of, given the complexity of the legalities involved, the third-party risks and the simple lack of a sound track record on such things. So for Arnaud to have this transaction carried out in a non-shipping-of-goods setting and to do it with a blockchain-structured electronic l/c rather than with paper documentation is exceptionally extraordinary and is a testament to all Arnaud’s hard work at HSBC over the past three years.
“That the coke he bought from his Kowloon-based Colombian dealer, Juan Pablo Gutierrez-Blanco, was of the utmost purity and had us crunking into the wee hours of Friday was just a bonus, on top of watching Arnaud pull this one out of his ass for the greatest save since the bailout of the American financial giants following the 2008 financial crisis.”
Although neither Villeneuve or Blandershot worked with Jutting, the former Bank of America Hong Kong banker convicted of killing two Indonesian women after a months-long coke- and narcissism-fueled boner ragefest that nobody at his bank could have foreseen despite Jutting’s walking around the office carrying a machete and with white powder randomly scattered around his nose from approximately January to October of 2014, they had both expressed concern recently of feeling unhinged and no longer having the motivation to meet their career goals of shagging every administrative assistant at HSBC while putting in zero actual facetime with corporate clients.
But those concerns were eased, if not eliminated altogether, during Thursday night’s outing. If anything, Villeneuve came out of the confab rejuvenated and feeling that his career was once again on the upswing owing to quick-witted display of financial wizardry, which, according to the Hong Kong Jockey Club, now has him the odds-on favorite to win Banker/Coke Fiend Of The Year, Hong Kong Edition.
Gutierrez-Blanco, too, seemed satisfied with the electronic l/c transaction.
“I would sell to that puta banking gringo anytime,” Gutierrez-Blanco said. “Even if at the end of the night he wanted more than anything else to trade a blowjob for the coke instead of actual money, I can live with a solidly sourced, eUCP-related contract, and I look forward to dealing with him in the future on even more lucrative win-win financing solutions.”