Chapter 113: For the Company’s Interests!

Chapter 113: For the Company’s Interests!

Madam Su had already decided: she was going to leave her daughter Su Qingying with no graceful way down.

She was also relieved that this was only a routine executive meeting—not a group-wide meeting, not a board meeting, not a shareholders’ meeting. A different occasion meant a different scale of damage from a clash between mother and daughter.

The impact had to be held to a minimum, and her daughter’s rebellion killed in the cradle.

“Zhou Da and Yang Kuo haven’t done anything wrong,” Su Qingying said.

“They’ve done nothing wrong and you still want to fire them?!” Madam Su slapped the table and rose again.

“But whether they should be fired doesn’t necessarily have any direct bearing on whether they’ve made mistakes,” Su Qingying said.

“Ridiculous! What sort of logic is that? Has anyone ever acted as recklessly as this?” Madam Su said at once. She wasn’t merely opposing Su Qingying herself; she was stirring up the feelings of every executive in the room.

Because she knew Su Qingying wanted to dismiss two mid-level managers. A matter like that required no board resolution whatsoever, let alone a shareholders’ meeting. Su Qingying genuinely did have the authority to dismiss them outright. With Su Ruiwen away, she could remove people without anyone’s consent.

Madam Su was afraid she would insist on acting alone.

So she needed the assembled executives to press Su Qingying together.

She knew that whatever else was true—even if her daughter had been put up to this by Li Ruobing and had suddenly turned against her today—Su Qingying could not possibly afford to offend the whole room. It would be extremely damaging to her future takeover of the company, and it would make people distrust her, question her.

And sure enough, at Madam Su’s words every executive in the conference room turned to look at Su Qingying.

Their expressions were plainly wrong.

Madam Su was not twisting logic by force. What Madam Su said was right.

It was Su Qingying’s words that had a serious problem.

Su Qingying pressed down every trace of unease and nervousness inside her, looked at Madam Su without expression, and went on. “Five days ago, on the morning of July 7, a major robbery took place at our Jinfu Group business hall in Donghai. The case was solved that same day, but the negative impact is still fermenting…”

“Donghai is where Jinfu Group’s headquarters stands,” Su Qingying said, sweeping her gaze across the executives again. “We have five stores here in total. The store on Commercial Street is not only the largest in Donghai but the largest in the entire country.”

“The Commercial Street store is the best and the highest in every respect—renovation, surveillance equipment, security level.”

“And that was precisely the store that was robbed. Diamond jewelry worth more than twenty million was taken on the spot. All of it has since been recovered, and yet the outside world has already begun to raise doubts about Jinfu Group’s internal management, to question our security capabilities. Even our partners have sent us multiple letters of inquiry these past few days…”

“The robbery itself was not our fault. But if our security measures were insufficient, if we couldn’t provide customers with a safe and reliable shopping environment, then that is my responsibility. Why was it only Jinfu Jewelry that was robbed? Why weren’t other jewelry stores robbed? Was our security force inadequate? Was there a problem with our security plan from the outset that made us a target?”

“We know that isn’t what happened. It was a sudden incident with a high degree of randomness. But the public doesn’t see us that way. And once the public begins to doubt us like that, will some customers come less often, or stop coming here to buy jewelry at all, out of concern for their own safety?”

“Even if encountering a robbery is a low-probability event, nobody wants to be the one who runs into it. And our competitors have been guiding…