He had parked in the same place as on the previous afternoon, and acknowledged the expired meter with a goodnatured tap on the face.As they got in, Millie asked what his earlier enquiries had revealed about the Humboldt Bank. Worse explained that it was an unlisted investment bank and, not being a public company, there was little compulsory disclosure to the Securities Commission. The building was occupied in the 1980s by the Port Building Society, which in a phase of poorly managed expansion had transformed itself into a bank. That business almost collapsed in 1987, and was taken over by VolksBank-AA. They never really prospered; the retail business declined and was subsumed by the majors. The nascent merchant banking section was bought out by venture capitalists and reinvented as the Humboldt Bank in 1999. Humboldt had a very low public profile. It served an exclusive private client group, and mostly dealt in currency trades, foreign exchange derivatives, and venture capital placements.
