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Steyn’s original assignment, to discover evidence of supposed corruption among Thai naval officers, arrived just as Covid-19 hit in March 2020. It would be another 10 months before he actually made it in to Thailand. In the meantime, there was a ton of media material to go through related to the XLII affair, which could be done remotely. Steyn briefed his client and took new instructions via Signal, the encrypted messaging app.
Koch was 11,000 miles away in Panama, where he’d co-founded the company Ocean Builders with Elwartowski and a Canadian tech entrepreneur named Grant Romundt. They planned to design and build homes for individuals wanting to live offshore. Steyn was only able to ferret out bits and pieces about his new client’s past. In conversation, Koch boasted of extensive military experience, which Steyn doubted. Online records indicated that Koch had worked as an IT consultant in the banking industry, having first got a masters degree in mechanical engineering from the Technical University of Braunschweig. Crypto had changed the trajectory of his life, and he was reportedly the founder of the first Africa-focused crypto exchange, Fikisha Africoin, which has since disappeared from the internet. With the price of bitcoin having risen ten-thousand-fold since Koch bought in, there was every reason to believe he was worth double-digit millions of dollars.
Steyn often provided Koch long readouts of his findings about the pod raid by the Thai navy, written in a clipped style that reads like a cross between Columbo dialogue and blurbs from Soldier of Fortune video games. Steyn thought he had some reassuring news for his boss: the interest of Thai authorities was focused solely on Elwartowski and Thepdet. Koch was not named and not a person of interest to local police. But Koch abruptly dismissed the information.
Steyn found this reaction a little odd, but his priority was keeping his client happy and engaged. The ex-policeman was using the Signal messaging app on his desktop computer, enabling him to pump out detailed reports at speed. Koch, on the other hand, was mostly sending short, sometimes garbled, responses from his phone, which he supplemented with voice messages.
Some of them elaborated on Koch’s new fascination which, by the standards of committed seasteaders, was in fact an old fascination. Since the earliest days of the movement, the idea of recommissioning a cruise liner had seemed the fastest route to libertarian utopia. Trouble was, they were expensive and various hare-brained, ship-based plans had come to nothing. Then Covid hit, bringing the price of cruise ships down dramatically.
In October 2020, Koch, along with Elwartowski and Romundt, purchased an ex-P&O Cruises vessel at the knockdown price of $9.5mn. The plan was to take ownership of the 70,000-tonne ship in Cyprus and sail it to a new berth in the Gulf of Panama, where it would serve as a liveaboard crypto trading venue, with 777 residential units on 14 decks. The Panamanian government, with its tradition of looking the other way on unconventional arrangements, was seemingly more amenable to the kind of experimentation that had flopped so badly in Thailand.