The Phoenix Ghost

SNAFU

You don't get to see the Ghost team or septs at all this chapter so I thought you'd enjoy the above pic while waiting patiently for the next chapter!

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Amanda was anxious. She knew in four days time the teams in Estonia were due to make first official contact with the Academy for this assignment. The Blackbourne team would be speaking with her father's replacement and possibly getting a whole lot of information that did not bode well for her team. Whether they'd be speaking to a newly appointed Chairman or the potentially vindictive President, Phil Roberts she didn't know but either way her father was no longer calling the shots for this assignment and Amanda had no idea how this new person would be approaching her as team liaison for the Andrews team considering she was Richard Andrews' daughter. They'd want to know how involved in her father's plans and views she'd been.

When she'd spoken to her dad two months ago during their second contact, the situation he'd described had been very bad. He was definitely sacked from his trustee position on the board. The fact he'd misrepresented himself by signing a contract with an external party for the assignment and sent in two Academy teams on his own recognisance was grounds enough to terminate his contract, never mind the fact he had done so outside of the board procedure. Trustees are required by law to be entirely objective and to have no operational input. A trustee's role is to be a legal check/balance to prevent strategic management of the charity from making decisions that go against the charity's purpose and also to ensure the board decisions safeguard the charities assets, both physical - like the buildings and land and intangible - like the Academy members and the organisation's reputation.

Dad had taken an operational decision by signing a contract without authority with an external party in the organisation's name and then sent the Blackbourne and Andrews teams to Estonia to satisfy the contract. According to the investigation results, he'd also potentially endangered the lives of the teams' members he'd assigned because the assignment contract had not gone through the proper vetting procedures before he'd accepted and signed it. Dad said that last item was just hysterical nonsense. I pray he's telling the truth but the fact that I doubt him at all is a bad indictment of his capacity to deceive. There were other findings in the report that he wouldn't go into about the assignment but it didn't matter because the first two were enough to have him stricken off the BoD. Not just for the Academy board either, he'll never be allowed legally to be a trustee again for any charity.

He had been waiting for his barrister (A British lawyer/solicitor allowed to practice in the higher courts of law in the U.K.) to get back to him about whether he was to face criminal charges or
not and if so in what country and court. As the Academy charity is registered in the U.K. it was complicated to work out the legal implications to dad. So dad could be facing jail time depending on what the Academy and police unearthed about the client the Academy is contracted to. When reviewing his case with his solicitor/barrister team, dad had tried to raise the case that his actions to remove Sang, Kayli and Lily from the Academy was him trying to safeguard the Academy's reputation. His legal team had stared at him in disbelief and asked him not to repeat that outside of their private offices because the case against him for discrimination was already virtually insurmountable without him giving the prosecution additional evidence against himself.

Dad had found this hard to swallow and wasted valuable time ranting about it when we'd spoken on the phone. Why was the law protecting immoral sluts? What about our right to live in a decent society? Amanda's conscious pricked at her slightly. If her father knew she preferred women to men, he would disown her. She'd carefully chosen her team of birds so that they were all like her in being lesbian but 'in the closet'. She'd thought it would make her lifestyle easier to hide. Then Dad had assigned her team to 'date' four of the Blackbourne dogs while on this assignment including and especially the team liaison, Owen Blackbourne.