The tax officials' professional competence and dedication came as a surprise to everyone in Jingnan Group—except Li Ye.
The reason it was so surprising was that Li Ye had shattered a consensus everyone had once accepted: it was perfectly normal for Cong Jinhong to swallow a thirty-percent premium.
It was like how, decades later, some people earned annual salaries of only a few hundred thousand, yet every last one of them lived in villas worth millions or tens of millions.
Their children were casually sent overseas to be gilded and pampered. They dared to eat, dared to drink, dared to take, dared to demand, dared to fuck—so long as the workhorses could think of it, there was nothing they did not dare.
But so what? People all thought it was normal. The workhorses at the bottom merely grumbled a few resentful words.
Back in the eighties and nineties, such brazen behavior was still relatively rare. People merely carried cigarettes, liquor, and canned goods to visit under cover of darkness, begging for advancement—but the nature of it was actually the same.
Why? Because everyone had grown accustomed to it?
No. It was because making a big gamble with a small stake was a thousand-year-old dreg left behind in the Land of Flowers, something people both loved and hated.
Just a few years ago, there had been a young man surnamed Chen in Fujian. He went to the North to sell timber, made some money, and began thinking about doing some "big business."
He had a sharp eye and set his sights on a barely surviving, clean but unprofitable hospital department. Then he poured in the enormous sum of three thousand yuan and began his enterprise.
Of those three thousand yuan, one thousand was the "premium," another thousand covered materials and injection