A multi-ethnic gang of four persons is working to-wards world domination. They have a secret hideaway in a quarry of the Dolomites which conceals a vast subterranean base, hollowed out in the heart of the mountain. From there they use wireless communications to transfer orders to thousands of their followers across many countries.
This is the plot in Agatha Christie's detective novel "The Big Four", first published in 1927, but it's not the plot I'm reading which is about the other "Big Four", the global accounting monopoly of Deloitte, Ernst & Young, PricewaterhouseCooper, and KPMG, who have staffs that are collectively larger than the Russian army and generate some US$130 billion ($168 billion) in annual revenue and are massively influential.
I was one of their foot-soldiers once, with PriceWaterhouse before they added the Cooper, and I even renewed my professional accreditation as recently as 1992, but now I'm just happy to read Gow and Kells' exposé about the "Big Four"'s drive for cash at the expense of their standards.
Other people's businesses no longer give me headaches as they did when I still thought I knew everything. Now I realise how little I've known, and I still don’t know much except not to stray too far from the Men's and to slowly drift off to sleep while listening to Phillip Adams' Late Night Live - click here - on this very same subject. Nighty-night.
