Aldottorai Colonial Trading Company

Structure

Overview

The ACTC, as a chartered company, is ultimately run by its shareholders. Of those, the Aldottorai Republic itself always, by law, owns a majority of the shares and dictates its leadership, missions, policies, and directives, especially later in its history when the ACTC more or less ceased to function independently of the government.

In practical terms, however, the Charter Director runs the company. The Finance Minister of the Aldottorai Republic appoints this position. While it is officially for life, there is nothing to prevent the Finance Minister from replacing one should they prove to be unsatisfactory, although this has rarely happened. The Charter Director has all the power and authority of an independent principality and the military forces to match.

The Charter Director also has the authority to appoint Consul-Generals who advise on the main components of the ACTC- trade, security, finance, development, and industry. These are often picked from the Magisterial Consuls, either from those who worked with the Charter Director in the past, those known for their competence, or the most ambitious and politically savvy. These positions have little actual authority, but their influence is profound and shapes the Charter Director's (and thus the Magistrate's) policies at a sweeping level.

Magisterial Command

The core of the ACTC is the Magisterial Command. These are semi-independent from the Charter Director, with each Magistrate appointed by the shareholders, primarily the Aldottorai Republic. These Magistrates are governors for life within the star systems to which they are appointed.
While most colonial systems also have local courts and representative councils, the Magistrates are the ones who genuinely rule the system, and their power is more or less unchecked. Only the Charter Director or Aldottorai government official can countermand or remove a Magistrate, although when this happens, it generally comes across as a suggestion than a command.

For the Magistrates, each colonized system functionally operates as a miniature company within the overall ACTC. There are construction departments, legal departments, payroll departments, security departments, shipbuilding companies, tradehouses, and even their own banks, all of which are subsidiaries of the ACTC and system governing corporation. While individual local structures can vary based on the whims of the Magistrate in charge, there are generally Chief Consuls of each major function of the colony- trade, security, finance, development, and industry.

• Trade Consuls primarily focus on the export and import of goods, generally to increase bullion import and goods export to foster a larger reserve of hard currency while minimizing the external currency transfer. They also maintain the ACTC's trade monopoly in each system until the system's purchase debt is paid in full. At this point, they take on a more regulatory role, albeit one that is also part of the competition.
• Security Consuls are the chief military commanders of the colony, in charge of all permanently stationed ACTC armed forces, local militias, mercenary companies, and law enforcement within the system. Despite this, they are officially superseded in rank by ACTC Armed Forces Directorate officers and Aldottorai military officials. Despite this, they are usually reasonably competent and professional, often being retired from either the Republican Guard or the Armed Forces Directorate.
• Finance Consuls oversee the colonial treasury (including income and expenses) through taxes and government spending, the profitability and survival of the banking system, and all accounting and finance transactions that go through the Colony. They are the second most hated consuls, as they set both tax and banking interest rates on loans. Their primary duty is to ensure the profitability of the colony to pay off the Aldottorai Republic's debts as quickly and efficiently as possible, regardless of the cost to the system's inhabitants.
• Development Consuls are usually the most respected by the system inhabitants, as these Consuls come from scientific rather than commercial backgrounds. They oversee the final stages of the terraforming process and all community and infrastructure developments within the system. More interested in the star system's overall well-being than that of the ACTC, they are tolerated by the others as a necessity, although canny Magistrates recognize that development will pay off far more in the long run for the colony's viability.
• Industry Consuls are typically the most hated. These are often business magnates and industrialists who run the production and manufacturing portions of the colony. That covers everything from shipbuilding to construction to oil drilling to commercial agriculture. As a result, they are the employer of most colonists and the one who sells all the necessities for life. They oversee and own all of the company stores, housing, and medical services, generally the only available or affordable to those who can't afford to pay the cost of independent businesses and the exorbitant taxes sey by the ACTC for conducting business on their property.

Executive Command

Outside of the Magisterial Command lies the Executive Command. The smaller and more focused departments that work and operate across the Company are the Directorate of Intelligence, Directorate of Finance, and Armed Forces Directorate. Each has its own Sub-Director who oversees the daily operations, but they are all directly under the command of the Charter Director.

• Directorate of Intelligence

The Directorate of Intelligence is the most feared of the three, as they have been known to be ruthless and unscrupulous in their duties and highly effective in using propaganda to enhance their reputation. They are, however, the smallest of the three executive directorates. Most of their agents worked independently in their home communities, with there never being more than a few hundred dedicated secret agents and even fewer of the greatly feared special agents and their special action teams.

Most Directorate Agents function as informants- writing reports, gathering rumors, and providing embedded information to those higher up the chain. They typically operate openly and within the administrations of Magistrates and Trade-Ambassadors in foreign regions of space. They monitor radio broadcasts and other generally public sources of information.

Directorate Secret Agents are the stuff of radio shows and pulp magazines, but they do exist and do perform covert work across the colonies and abroad in foreign governments. They are mainly active within Vanaeran Corporate Space and the Diskward Marches, but more than a few have been assigned to the Kais colonies in order to infiltrate secret societies, labor movements, criminal organizations, and other groups suspected of seditious or otherwise subversive activity. Masters of disguise, secrecy, communication, and evasion, they are frequently feared but almost never seen.

That, however, is not the case for Directorate Special Agents and their Special Action Teams. These agents are outside the usual hierarchy and can requisition resources and manpower from any ACTC organizations they need and take precedence over all other Company business. These Special Agents act under the direct command of the Charter Director and answer to no one else. Nor are they bound by any particular set of laws or regulations like the Security Consuls or Armed Forces Directorate. The job of Special Agents and Special Action Teams are to identify, hunt down, and destroy all threats to the Company and deter any more from developing by any means necessary. Labor organizers and fledgling unions are often frequent targets, creating a special enmity between Special Agents and Labor reformers. However, pirates, smugglers, organized crime, and independence activists also receive their fair share of attention.

• Directorate of Finance

All the money within the Kais Sector runs through the Directorate of Finance. They oversee the ACTC treasury, with its income and expenses, including the all-important debt payments to the creditors that own the Aldottorai debt. They also work as the central bank and mint for the colonial currencies, whose exchange rates and value they manipulate for favorable conversion for the Aldottorai dollar. For the most part, the Finance Directorate operates within the Aldottorai Republic rather than within the colonial sector, placing them very distant from the people whose lives they affect.
The Directorate is split into three components:

• Banking acts as a central bank for the Company and oversees the smaller system-based company banks, as well as all loans owned by the Company itself, while also offering loans to smaller banks both within and without the Company.
• Currency is in charge of the accumulation of bullion and other hard currencies and the printing of paper money to be distributed within the colony worlds, most frequently as a form of company scrip, but also limited amounts of Aldottrai currency. They direct the banking department to adjust interest rates as a means of manipulating the value of their currency in the colonized systems to ensure a strong Aldottorai dollar. Unique among the Finance Directorate, the Currency Department has a semi-independent investigative agency with broad powers to investigate all aspects and personnel within the Company, regardless of their rank. The Finance Investigative Department is more or less the only internal accountability within the ACTC, although they are primarily concerned with financial crimes like counterfeiting, embezzlement, and other cases of theft from the Company coffers moreso than any sort of ethics or internal policing.
• Fiscal is the largest of the three departments. It oversees the day to day financial operations of the Company, collecting and tallying payments, paying employees, signing off on expense accounts, and paying bills. Profits from the system-based subsidiaries are all funneled directly into the Fiscal department of the financial directorate, where it is reinvested into further Company growth, external investments, or converted into bullion for storage. The vast majority of the fiscal Companymen are accountants, clerks, and tellers.

• Armed Forces Directorate

Being a frontier sector, the Company realized very early on that their trade monopoly and security were both vulnerable and valuable targets for commercial rivals, pirates, and expansionist neighbors, along with the inevitable colonial unrest. From the inception of the Company, they established an Armed Forces Directorate to act as security for the Company and its resources, not necessarily for the colonies themselves, or their people. While the Magistrates command all permanently stationed armed forces, including militias and Company armed forces, the Armed Forces Directorate commands the majority of the forces.
Being a space-based organization, the Company has rejected the concept of a separate army and navy and instead integrated them into one organization called the Company Fleet. However, there are auxiliary and specialist units outside the fleet. In the fleet, the vast majority of the ships are frigates and are used for convoy and patrol duty, as well as commerce raiding and privateering on behalf of the Aldottorai Republic. They do have a handful of ships that can be rated as cruisers in size and armament, but these are rarely deployed in times of peace. Additionally, the Company relies on picket carriers for their small craft- sending these smaller carriers out on the fringes of a convoy to create a multilayered screen around the merchantmen.
Within the fleet, anyone can enlist, but commissions must be purchased or awarded for meritorous service. Enlisted ranks are fairly streamlined and basic, with more weight being given to job classification and competency than rank. Spacers are highly paid within the Company Fleet, so there is never a shortage of volunteers, especally among the colonists who see it as a chance to get qualifying work experience, training, and higher pay than is usually available on their homeworld. As a result, the Company Fleet is the most professional standing military force in the Kais Colonial Sector and compared to the neighboring sectors within the Diskward Marches.
The Fleet Ranks are composed of the following:

• Enlisted: Spacer Apprentice, Able Spacer, Senior Able Spacer, Corporal, Petty Officer, Chief Petty Officer
• Commissioned: Midshipman, Ensign, Lieutenant, Lieutenant Commander, Captain, Commodore, Admiral

Outside the fleet lie the specialist and auxiliary commands, which were added later to increase the Directorate's effectiveness outside the standard fleet operations.

• Fleet Intelligence was formed shortly after the inception of the Directorate after the fleet commanders realized that the Directorate of Intelligence was not necessarily to be trusted to share all the necessary information with the fleet or even to share the same priorities. Not that anyone would openly accuse the Intelligence Directorate of misleading the Fleet or intentionally causing harm, but the suspicion remained there after several trade convoys were captured in their entirety by pirates without a shot or distress signal being broadcast. After that, the Armed Forces Directorate created its own military intelligence units. A fierce rivalry has developed between the Fleet Intelligence and Intelligence Directorate as a result.
• Company Engineers were always part of the AFD but separate from the fleet as they were responsible originally for the construction and maintenance of Company buildings and structures. They often go ahead of the Company colony ships to construct the rudimentary infrastructure after a planet is settled and are responsible for its maintenance. They tend to work very closely with Development Consuls on their projects, but also build fortifications and combat landing zones ahead of the Fleet. For the most part separate from the rest of the Company hierarchy, they are famous for their indepdence and ingenuity when faced with building challenges, but also their sometimes lackadaisical approach to safety regulations.
• Company Signals Command is the dedicated communications wing for the Company, maintaining the radios, regular transmissions, codes, and all other aspects the Company needs for secure communications. While the Charter Director and Magistrates generally communicate via their own secured radio networks, albeit ones still overseen and run by the Signals Command, the rest of the company requires an entire command to manage its routine communications be it via radio, courier messages, or radio teletype. Considered the eggheads of the Company, they generally enjoy their work and push the bounds of what are considered technologically possible in the fields of communication science.
• Special Missions Command was developed after a group of Company administrators were kidnapped by Vanaeran privateers and a Fleet attempt to rescue them led to the deaths of the privateers and all of the hostages when the Fleet's infantry stormed the space station and heavy combat led to the accidental decompression of the entire station. After action reports realized that while the ground troops were well trained for frontal assaults on fortified planetside locations, they were neither equipped nor trained for the specialized and delicate nature of rescue missions in a vacuum. As a result, they formed a new command separate from the Fleet, recruiting both from within the Fleet and from external volunteers dedicated to special missions, including raids, rescues, sabotage, and special forms of surveillance, with dedicated training to vacuum-based missions, airborne insertions, and other methods that are too dangerous or too technical for the standard Company infantry. They are the best of the best that the Company can hire and some of the most combat-hardened troops at the Charter Director's disposal.
• Fleet Logistics Auxiliary Even for a massive, multi-system mercantile company, logistics aren't easy. The Fleet and other Company departments use too many resources to transport  aboard the company's merchantmen while remaining profitable. As a result, the Fleet Logistics Auxilliary was formed as a secondary and official logistics command within the Company. Composed of a combination of dedicated Fleet support vessels, ranging from troop transports to oil tankers to freezer ships to hospital ships to recreational stations, and chartered private companies, the FLA works primarily at supplying the executive Directorates and Magistrate's local armed forces. Most of its members are a blend between Company uniformed spacers and the more relaxed spacers who serve aboard the merchantmen, fitting in with neither. They are, however, trained in military and combat requirements beyond that of the merchantmen crews, giving the Fleet a dedicated and pre-existent reserve force it can pull on if necessary.

Public Agenda

Hereforth, by the authority granted by the elected representatives of the Aldottorai Republic, on the third of April, in the year two-thousand, one hundred and seven, we sign and recgonize the charter of the Aldottorai Colonial Trading Company. Its mission is to further the economic interests of the Republic through its furtherance of the economic development, commercial profit, and security of the new-formed colonies.

Officially, the ACTC exists as a centralized, efficient method of fostering faster economic growth within the Kais Colonial Sector. In theory, removing the tax burden from the Aldottorai Republic makes sense by creating a self-funded and self-sustaining company to oversee the development of each colony to an autonomous point.
However, in reality, the purpose of the ACTC is to squeeze as much profit out of the Kais Colonial Sector as possible and as quickly as possible. The Republic's administration, who purchased the colony rights for the entire sector, had more ambition than financial sense. The next administration realized they could never afford to pay the interest rates from the loans, let alone the cost of settling and developing the sector into a part of the Republic like the neighboring systems. It created a domestic and financial crisis that was only resolved with the establishment of the ACTC.
All other concerns are secondary for the ACTC. The Aldottorai Republic must be maintained and kept stable regardless of the cost to the colonies or their inhabitants. Much of the legitimacy of the Republic was based on their promises of expanding and stabilizing the frontier into prosperous, vibrant partners within the Republic. If the Republic was forced to shoulder the entire sector cost, however, the whole government would be bankrupted. and its promises revealed as a sham.

Assets

While many like to say that the assets of the Aldottorai Colonial Trading Company are incalculable, that is not the case. They are precisely and accurately calculated daily by the many accountants of the Finance Directorate. They are, however, far surpassing most frontier governments. The specifics, however, are closely guarded secrets. Their liquid assets are estimated to be in the billions, while non-liquid assets are even higher, with significant portions tied up in industrial and manufacturing holdings across the colony systems. The oil fields of Kais Xi II is considered one of their most valuable properties as they are the largest and most reliable in the entire Kais sector. 

Regarding ships, the ACTC owns approximately seven hundred merchant vessels of various types, with the general cargo carriers being the most common, followed by oilers and other tankers. As far as warships, they are generally believed to own somewhere between three hundred and four hundred, most of which are rated as frigates. No reliable estimate of small craft exists.

According to Aldottorai Republic tax records, the ACTC boasts an annual gross income upwards of 1.8 billion. The accuracy remains debatable, given the market manipulations between company scrip and Aldottorai dollars, as well as the countless subsidiaries and smaller companies owned by the Company and questionable tax records within the Kais Sector itself and from engaging with foreign trade and privateering. 

Regarding land holdings, they are the effective owners of nearly twenty-four star systems, with dozens of inhabited colonies between them all. Some of these colonies rival that of Terra-based powers in terms of commercial potential, but the relentless extraction of wealth makes it hard to judge.

History

• 2092: The Arbuthnot administration of the Aldottorai Republic raised taxes and swept to power on the promise of securing the Republic as a frontier power player dedicated to bringing stability, liberty, and democracy to the neighboring sectors of the as-of-yet uninhabited Diskward Marches. Much of their purchases were accomplished by enormous loans that the government promised would be quickly paid off.
• 2097: Within five years, it became a starkly evident reality that colonizing these worlds would be far more complex and expensive than Arbuthnot had anticipated, which was a revelation that sent shockwaves through the Aldottorai financial system as the true scale of the interest payments alone became clear.
• 2101: The Republic's economic growth stagnates beneath the weight of the cost of the colonial sector, and the opposition begins expressing the idea of selling the rights to their creditors, causing an uproar among the more expansionist parties. Private enterprise alternatives are considered.
• 2103: A trio of entrepreneurs recognize the growing financial crisis as an opportunity they have been waiting for and begin creating a proposal and sharing it with sympathetic government officials. This would eventually grow into the charter of the Aldottorai Colonial Trading Company.
• 2107: After four years of political maneuvering and popular campaigning, the Aldottorai Republic officially chartered the Company, granting them the economic monopoly of the entire sector with the understanding that the Company would have to turn a profit almost immediately, and the three entrepreneurs went to work directly.
• 2112: Within five years, they had a small but thriving colony on Kais Alpha I turning a small profit, from which they launched onto the other planets within the Kais Alpha system.
• 2230: The debt for the Kais Alpha System was officially paid in full, proving the efficacy of the private enterprise in turning colonization into a highly beneficial endeavor for the various polities and securing the Company's future for the next four centuries as the savior of the Republic's colonial project.

Fortunam et Futuram

Type

Founding Date

April 13, 2107

Type

Consortium, Business

Alternative Names

The Colonial Company, The Company, AldottCo

Training Level

Professional

Veterancy Level

Trained

Demonym

Companymen

Leader

Helena Lorenz

Ruling Organization

Aldottorai Republic

Leader Title

Charter Director

Founders

• Bennet McGill
• Joseph Cullen
• Molly Jordan

Parent Organization

Aldottorai Republic

Location

Kais Colonial Sector

Related Species

• Human