"We had wired more than $60m into the account two weeks earlier, so I asked again. Sure enough, there was now only a few million left. About $58m had been transferred out over the previous three days. I was speechless."

"How could that have happened? The signature cards lodged at the bank required signatures from our side before payments could be made. As I tried to understand what had happened, Pat called in from the US."

"After I explained that $58m appeared to be missing, there was a long pause and then: "We gotta find that fucking money or it'll be time-out from the investors!"

"In the end, out of the 17 factories that we bought in China - apart from brewing beer, we were making all sorts of automotive components - we had to replace 15 of our original factory directors."

Sometimes we had to do it more than once when our first choice didn't work out. Most fights took months, maybe a year, of laborious, convoluted negotiations but each time we booted out a director the company's results improved almost immediately."

"In our worst year, when the battles were at their height, we reported losses of nearly $40m. But a few years on, after we'd replaced the old factory directors with smart, young Chinese, the company was making profits of nearly $20m and churning out cash. But even with the turnaround, by Wall Street's equations the whole endeavour had failed dismally; the hole we had made for ourselves in the earlier years was too deep."