The Corporate Governance Committee hearing was held in the most forbidding chamber of the LX building: the Legacy Hall. It was a cold, neo-classical room of dark wood and portraits of severe, long-dead Cha patriarchs. The committee of five—three elderly men and two steely-eyed women, all veterans of a corporate world that valued discretion above all—sat on a raised dais, looking down on the proceedings like judges in a star chamber. The air was thick with the scent of lemon polish and suppressed hostility.
The gallery was packed. Board members, senior executives, and a carefully vetted pool of financial press filled the rows, their murmurs a low, hungry buzz. Cameras were banned, but reporters' pens were poised over notebooks like scalpels.
