Cmdr Ivan Matzov was born to middle class parents, and raised in middle class starport suburbian anonymity. His father, a bank manager, had wanted him to follow in the family business, and fill in forms for portly merchants behind a desk, arranging small loans for their comfortable businesses. Cmdr Matzov thus received a decent education and began his apprenticeship at Sol Commercial & Industrial Bank.
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Over the course of his early years in the bank Matzov encountered many ordinary tradesmen & tradeswomen. Each with their own petty dreams of expansion, or fears of bankruptcy. However, he had made good loans, and sound decisions, and as such had been transferred to a low level credit & capital financing position in the investment banking arm of Sol Corporate & Investment Bank, SCIB for short. It was here that he began to see a different side to the world. A world in which money was exchanged, and lives altered. Goods were exchanged and fortunes were made or lost. Whole societies could be enriched or thrown into the most terrible poverty thanks to the investments and divestments made on a daily basis by hugely powerful individuals and corporations. Sometimes, even, wars were fought. Lives were lost. And it excited him.
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Matzov decided he too, with a few canny moves, could enter this world, albeit at a low level. He set up a holding company, Matzov Intragalactic, and arranged a loan for himself via a friend in the bank. Not wholly above board, not wholly appropriate, but not entirely fraudulent either. It afforded him the chance to hire a pilot, loan a Sidewinder, and begin to trade stocks and ship goods around the local systems on the basis of insider knowledge. It worked. Matzov Intragalactic began to flourish. In fact, it flourished too well, and suspicions began to fester.
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Things came to a head one evening after the hired pilot, Maximus Dogface, got drunk and began telling the bar clientele of the fantastic deal that he had going on with a banker he called 'The Fat Controller'. Of course, most people in the bar were utterly uninterested, but two people were captivated. One, a widowed middle manager in a small arms manufacturing company, on business from Ikpenones. The second, a federal investigator. Both would follow Maximus back to his ship that evening, but only one would return before he was fully awake.
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Maximus introduced Mary Hepburn to 'The Fat Controller' with her proposal. In the process, it became clear to Cmdr Matzov that Maximus had been far too indiscreet. Their time together was at an end. They have not spoken since, and nor have they seen each other. Had you asked him at the time, Matzov probably would have said Maximus Dogface was an ill-educated scrub, living in a world that Matzov would never dream of inhabiting - indeed Matzov wanted to move in very much more rarefied circles. But he would also have said Maximus was dangerous. Very dangerous. No sense in an unfriendly parting. Matzov was no fighter.
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Mary Hepburn proposed a lucrative new sideline for Matzov Intragalactic. Gun-running. Utterly illegal in Federation space, but very profitable. Matzov, a man who liked to think of himself as principled, felt instinctively that he should say no, little knowing that Federal Investigator Arnold Mulligan was at that very moment closing in on Maximus. Mary was no dowdy former housewife, easily dissuaded. On the contrary, her years in the murky world of arms dealers had given her an inner strength, and the untimely death of her husband had given her a moral compass that was permanently subject to magnetic disturbance. She rightly pointed out to Matzov that she knew the system he employed, and that it was also unlawful, and that he was a hypocrite for showing such squeamishness. And, moreover, she would happily go to the local cops, and then head home to Ikpenones, if he didn't play ball.
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Arnold Mulligan never did catch-up with Maximus, but he had 'The Fat Controller' to go on. He asked around discreetly, with no great joy. But it alerted both Mary - via contacts in the Federal arms underground, and Matzov - via inquiries made at various banks including his own employer, that the cops knew about the insider trading scheme too. Mary could now turn the screw, and a few weeks after their first meeting, Matzov - now terrified of Federal jail time, and without a pilot - relented. Things had to move quickly now before any imaginary Arnold Mulligan shaped net started to fall.
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In his panic, Matzov was faced with a stark reality. He had to leave. He had to take his money, his loaned pilotless Sidewinder, and leave his white-collar life behind. He had thought of his crime as a little white lie. A harmless escapade, like shop-lifting as a child. But it had put him firmly in a grey world that was getting darker by the minute. He had to traffic Mary's guns, but he could not run away, he had to walk away. If he just upped and left, liquidated Matzov Intragalactic, without a word or a decent explanation to friends and colleagues, then he may as well have just sent a note of confession to the cops. No, he had to use his brain a bit.
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Over the next week he began the process of transferring his company registration to the StkM 1-616 system, and put around the story that he was leaving the bank to give his business venture his fulltime attention in a system that he knew had a lively market and was a trading hub on routes through Alliance, Federation and Empire space. He tendered his resignation at the bank and consolidated his assets. He took a pilot crash course, and failed to get a license. He bribed the official. He arranged the termination of the loan deal for the Sidewinder and invested all but a small amount of his company assets in an Adder with virtually all A rated specifications and an expanded cargo hold. He took a loan - a legitimate one this time - out against the value of his company assets, and leveraged all he had by investing in stock, on the whisper of a friend at the bank... and discreetly stowed the guns. It was all or nothing to StkM 1-616 via Ikpenones now. Not too fast, not too slow.
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In the end the gun-run and the business move went without much drama. Matzov made his delivery and a new business. He heard little of life back in Sol, and he never headed back. Afterall, what did the cops really have to go on other than a mysterious banker named 'The Fat Controller'?. Through Mary he made new contacts in the Arms and Defense sector, and ran legitimate trades between systems where armaments were legal, alongside utilizing some of his old contacts who'd moved out of Sol to trade in high-tech materials and metals.
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Maximus had never been the loquacious type, but after a few drinks he could tell some tall stories, as evidenced by that night in the bar that started Ivan Matzov's flight from Sol, and his flying career. Still, Matzov had taken various snippets from some of those stories Maximus had told, and constructed himself a little extra backstory to help cover his tracks. He was no longer 'The Fat Controller', but had taken to using 'The Colonel'. It gave him a certain gravitas in the arms business, and whenever anyone inquired into his military career, he muttered - a la Maximus - that it was not something he wanted to talk about, and nor was it relevant. A line he was particularly fond of, as it was both true and not. Much like he was. True because he didn't want to talk about it; untrue because his self-styled title was completely relevant to his reputation in the industry, and the kudos it brought.
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Lately though, 'The Colonel' Cmdr Ivan Matzov had found himself getting further and further from the shady arms dealer he had become, almost by accident. Contacts and profits were booming in his high-tech and metals deals. It had enabled him to expand Matzov Intragalactic, and the money coming in even allowed him to take sabbaticals where he would explore nebulae on 2 week trips. New opportunities were on the horizon as new powers and entities came into the galactic market place. The old certainties of Federation, Empire and Alliance were fissuring. A new set of circumstances might lead to new profits, new influence, a new move...