Keruba International

Keruba International is an arms manufacture, that was once a major corporation and founding member of the Inter-Coporate Council

History

Founded at the turn of the century in Slovenia, Keruba began as a consortium of military manufactures and was the first company to develop a commercially viable vectored-thrust vehicle. With Nerby conflicts in the middle east, unrest in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and the Russo-Polish "Border wars" ensuring a large market for their products. They company began diversifying into other forms of heavy industry, global telecomm, and security for computer hardware and software. The computer branches of the business initially contributed to the bottom line only as a side project, but the Keruba technician-s research would bring rich rewards a few decades later.

By 2010, Keruba had followed the leads of Shiawase and the rest of the "Big Seven" by becoming a significant extraterritorial power in its own right. And, setting a precedent for expanding corporations that continues to the present day, it began celebrating its newfound power by picking fights with its rivals. BMW had followed Keruba's lead into the design and manufacture of military LAVs, and by virtue of its longer history and reputation for quality, quickly began cutting significantly into Keruba's sales. Keruba responded to this competition in 2011 with a military operation against one of BMW's main research divisions, and an escalating series of retaliatory strikes costing both sides dozens of lives and (more importantly, in the companies' view) billions of petrodollars before the conflict petered out. This costly exchange formed the primary impetus for founding the Inter-Corporate Council, the precursor of today's Corporate Court.

Two years later, Keruba had the dubious honor of being involved in the first major skirmish brought before the ICC to resolve, a protracted conflict between Keruba and ORO (the corporation that would evolve into Aztechnology). The motives behind this struggle are less clear, but the conflict inflicted heavy costs on both sides, and Keruba found itself severely weakened both militarily and financially. Other corps took this situation as a sign that Keruba was a ripe candidate for a takeover bid, and several first- and second-tier corps attempted to incorporate Keruba into their holdings. The leading contenders were such formidable corporate empires as Ares Macrotechnology, BMW (now Saeder-Krupp), and Mitsuhama; but the stubborn resistance (and enormous personal fortune) of CEO Kerpan Ubavie allowed Keruba to maintain its independence.

The Crash of '29 dealt a massive blow to all the corporations, but Keruba found itself in worse shape than most. Compounding the problems of the company, Ubavie was killed in a midair jet collision over Dulles International, one of many such collisions attributed to the Crash virus' penetration of the United States' air-traffic control system. Ubavie had maintained such tight personal control over virtually every aspect of the company that his death left Keruba leaderless and without direction at the most critical juncture in the company's history.

Enter Inazo Aneki, a fiery young corporate raider from Chiba with an eye for opportunity and a "can't miss" reputation. Aneki had been looking for a ripe military investment since the Crash, recognizing that global conflict was likely to follow such massive economic upheaval. When he learned of Keruba's weakened condition, he acted immediately. Hastily forming a corporation he named Renraku Holdings for the express purpose of taking over Keruba. Using his history of extraordinarily profitable takeovers as collateral, Aneki secured a massive loan from Global Financial Services, enlisted the aid of several fellow corporate mavericks and bought Keruba from the panicked shareholders.

Aneki initially planned to sell of Keruba, in pieces or as a whole, as soon as the global market recovered to the point where the company would be profitable again. However, without Ubavie at the helm, the corporation had quickly degenerated into a collection of individual divisions with no unifying direction, and Aneki found it necessary to use a more hands-on strategy in order to keep the company from completely fragmenting into a series of unrelated and unprofitable entities. In the years following the Crash, he discovered that he enjoyed guiding a single company to success and decided to stay on as Renraku's chariman rather than sell it off to engage in another round of corporate raiding. Relocating the corporate headquarters to Chiba, Japan; Aneki and his fellow shareholders began transforming Keruba, a disjointed collection of companies held together only by Ubavie's personal magnetism, into Renraku, a modern Japanese-style keiretsu that would endure beyond the leadership of any one man. Aneki's ability to lead, however, did not yet measure up to his desire.

Endnotes

Index

• M Blood in the Boardroom, 37,38