Chapter 175 Special Operations

"Your Highness the Duke, I didn't expect you to play tennis so well."

Tamaran Ecclestone, wearing a cool tennis outfit, accompanied Barron, wiping sweat with a towel and saying with a bright smile.

I have to say that her figure is indeed very good, especially when the two of them were playing ball just now, Barron's eyes couldn't help but be attracted by her dancing position.

Where they are now is the Hurlingham Club in West London.

The Hurlingham Club was built in 1829. It is currently the largest club in England and one of the most difficult clubs in the world to join.

Because the Hurlingham Club currently has about 13,000 members and is a hereditary system, an old member must quit or die before a new member can be added, and it must be proposed and seconded by two current members. There is currently a 30-year waiting time.

And Barron was automatically qualified because the Devonshire family was a member of this club.

He chose to come here because the privacy of this kind of club is very good, especially this top-level club. No one can enter. Barron does not have to worry about being secretly photographed by tabloid reporters.

Speaking of which, London can be said to be the capital of private clubs in the world. After all, the earliest private clubs originated in London.

That is White's Club. This private club is considered to be the earliest private club in the world. It was established in 1693. It is very low-key, private and unique.

In its heyday, it was home to nearly half of the British male aristocracy.

Barron is also a member of the oldest club. Apart from the Devonshire Hotel, this is the only place where he met Cameron - Cameron is also a member of the White's Club, and his father also served as the President of the club.

In addition, the Prince of Wales and Prince William are also members of this club - in 1981, the Crown Prince's bachelor party before marrying Princess Diana was held here.

Prince William, like Barron, just joined the White's Club this year. To this day, this club is still one of the few that follows tradition and refuses female members to join. In its more than 300 years of history, the only female guest to appear in the White's Club is Her Majesty the Queen.

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"In the end, NetEase issued approximately 310,000 new shares to us at a price of US$16.12, with a total value of US$5 million."

Amber Sheehan has returned to London from China and has finished handling matters related to Penguin and NetArt. He said:

"This part of the stock needs to have a 12-month lock-up period, and cannot enter the secondary market for trading before then."

Although by the end of September, NetArt's stock price will reach its highest price of US$55.86 in recent years, the additional shares issued this time will not be available for trading at that time.

However, those NetArt stocks purchased by DS Capital earlier can be sold out at that time, and the 310,000 additional shares issued now can be kept for the long term.

With Barron's completing the acquisition of Argos, his current large-scale acquisitions have temporarily come to an end.

In the following time, his energy will mainly be focused on operating the existing business.

After all, these acquisitions, including O2 Telecom, Manchester United and Argos, have all used leveraged buyouts, and so far he has been saddled with more than 6 billion pounds of debt.

Even because of these acquisitions, many media reports described Barron's actions as "crazy" and predicted that once a business encounters difficulties, it will fall into an overall collapse due to a financial domino effect.

But now it seems that they may be destined to be disappointed.

Take his biggest acquisition - O2 Telecom. Three months after Barron completed the acquisition, the reorganized O2 Telecom launched a "super package" for British home users because of its cooperation with Digital UK. In the past three months, the number of new users in England alone has exceeded 1.5 million, which has increased O2 Telecom's revenue by more than 30%.

The so-called "super package" is a comprehensive monthly package that includes mobile phones and broadband for home users, as well as some free service packages from the Freeview platform.

You can even get more favorable tariff packages for family members.

This deep binding makes it easy for those users and their families to become O2 Telecom users.

And with the investment in O2 Telecom's local broadband business, its broadband speed has also been greatly improved after the upgrade. Lower tariffs and higher network speeds suddenly caught other telecom companies off guard.

In addition, O2 Telecom has also entered the French and German markets. Although in these two newly entered markets, it does not have the advantage of being in England, every user it acquires there is additional... …

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"How's the progress now?"

"Your Highness the Duke, we have found traces of one of its members in Latvia, and the special operations team has set off to rush there..."

Barron has never given up on the pursuit of the "London Star" gang. However, because of the limited power he could use and the extreme caution of the other party, even with some intelligence support from MI6, it still did not have much impact. Progress.

But now, more than a year has passed in this case, and because the other party has been slightly negligent, the intelligence team has caught its traces.

What was discovered this time was a relatively unremarkable member of the original "London Star" gang. Intelligence showed that the other party had recently appeared in Latvia.

Latvia is one of the three Baltic countries. Since the collapse of the former Soviet Union, the presence of these countries has not been very strong.

To sum up, it can be described in one word - chaos.

After Barron fully took control of the Protector Military Services Company, his intelligence team received more support. His intelligence advisor Nigel Inkster specially selected five of the most elite former Protector personnel. Members who served in the special forces and had experience in collecting military intelligence formed a special operations team specifically for this operation against the "London Star" gang.

At present, this special operations team has set off for Latvia. Once the gang member is captured, Barron will not worry about being able to pry open the other party's mouth.

However, this operation is not that easy. After all, this special operations team is actually just a personal armed force. It also has to go deep into other countries. The "enemies" they face are not just the "London Star" gang. members, as well as local law enforcement...