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grow still further, and he was scouting around for investors to finance expansion. Ultimately, Burt provided an introduction to an Argentine private equity firm, the Exxel Group, run by a flashy buyout specialist, Juan Navarro, who was based in Buenos Aires. This Uruguayan-born investor cut a glamorous figure: he lived in a penthouse, cultivated expensive tastes, and was known for his aggressiveness. In 1991, he quit a successful career at Citibank’s Argentine venture capital unit to launch his own firm, Exxel. He secured investments from GE Pension Trust, Rockefeller and Company, Liberty Mutual, and Columbia University, and began investing billions in nearly 100 companies, mostly concentrated in Latin America.
    During the course of negotiations with Exxel, Baker began to feel uncomfortable about the future of Diligence. The new cash would mean big-time expansion, and new management responsibilitiesfor himself and Day. He says now that he was worried and felt it might be better to bring on a professional CEO who would have the experience to expand the company without wasting money. Baker disclosed to his colleagues and prospective investors such as Exxel Group that he wouldn’t stay on board much longer.
    Exxel Group invested in Diligence, reportedly taking a $15 million stake in it. Baker cashed out, selling his remaining 15 percent stake in Diligence to Exxel as part of the transaction. Barbour Griffith and Rogers cashed out, too. No one involved will reveal the exact numbers regarding who got what. But even if the deal valued Diligence at a relatively small amount of money, it’s likely that Baker walked away from the deal with more than $1 million in cash, a tidy profit from his five-year involvement with the company.
    Now it would be up to Day, running Diligence on his own, to deploy the remaining money and generate the kind of growth his new investors were expecting. Soon, his attention would turn to a new client that Baker had been working hard to sign just before leaving the firm, Russia’s largest commercial bank, Alfa Bank. Alfa was already a client of the lobbying firm Barbour Griffith and Rogers, which in 2005 received $680,000 in fees from Alfa.
    What’s more, the lobbyists disclosed in federal filings that they didn’t do any lobbying at all that year for Alfa. That’s a lot of money to pay a lobbying firm that’s not doing any lobbying. Often, lobbying firms are paid not to lobby—the technical definition of which is contacting public officials on behalf of a client—but to “consult,” which means simply to provide advice to the client about how to handle Washington. *
    Before he left Diligence, Baker says, he pushed the lobbyiststo provide an introduction to Alfa. The huge Russian bank would make a great client for Diligence. Barbour Griffith and Rogers made the connection, and soon after that, Nick Day was in Bermuda fetching KPMG’s documents out from under rocks.
    The anonymous document drop at KPMG in October 2005 put a stop to that operation. On November 10, 2005, KPMG Financial Advisory Services filed suit against Diligence, alleging fraud. 4 But the legal complaint filed by KPMG was heavily censored. Page after page of the publicly available version of the document was left blank, simply stamped “REDACTED” in bold letters.
    Perhaps the complaint was so heavily shielded from view because the company feared letting even more sensitive details of the case into the open. But perhaps, too, KPMG held back so much of its filing because the company was embarrassed at how easily an employee had been duped out of its most secret corporate work product. After all, KPMG is one of the world’s largest accounting and consulting firms. It routinely handles the deepest secrets of the biggest companies in the world. What would its clients think if they knew those documents could leak out to corporate spies?
    Indeed, the entire case was filed under seal, and it wasn’t until months later that any of