Látuxarin

A látuxarin (/lˠaʊ.tˠuː.χˠa.rɪn/; literally “capital clan”) is a type of business group in Kiravia composed of of numerous corporate units, subsidiaries, and affiliates diversified across multiple sectors and controlled by a specially-constituted trust entity.

A distinguishing feature of the classic látuxarin is that interest in the controlling trust entity and membership of its board (kirstuv) is held wholly or substantially by several “founding families” ( livnáridanrinya ) who contributed capital to the original venture from which the larger conglomerate grew. The governing document that establishes the trust entity – known as a charter (wordhere) or covenant (wordthere) – is drafted with the familial nature of the interested parties in mind, and contains provisions that incorporate (or supersede) the families’ applicable customary law(s) with regard to matters such as inheritance, seniority, majority, kinship, marriage, and disownment. The charters are crafted to balance the interests of the founding families and other parties, provide mechanisms for resolution of inter- and intra-familial disputes, and maintain the integrity and value of the trust and its assets without involving the civil courts.

Látuxarin originated in the 1940s and 1950s AD on the territory of the Kiravian Remnant, and were instrumental in realising the exiled Federalist government’s programme of rapid export-led industrial growth and modernisation. Those látuxarin that survived to see Kiravian Reunification were major beneficiaries of the privatisation of the former Kiravian Union’s state-owned assets, and were similarly major contributors to national reconstruction and the revitalisation of the Mainland economy, while also receiving much blame for the negative effects of industrial restructuring on Second and Third Kirav. Though some aspects of the látuxarin model have changed since the 1990s due to reforms in competition law, the maturation of the market economy, and wider global economic trends, they remain important pillars of the Kiravian economy in terms of productivity, exports, and employment, and indeed some post-reunification concerns like IXCO Digital and Paramount Atrassic have consciously emulated the látuxarin approach to integration and corporate governance.

History

Large, conglomerated business groups pursuing a wide range of activities were far from unprecedented in the history of Kiravian capitalism: Colonial mercantile companies like the Bay Trading Company and Kerēgulan Merchants of the Tropics wielded nearly sovereign power while competing with one another and their Burgundine counterparts in everything from plantation agriculture to land speculation to mercenary services. The ice lords and rail barons of the 19th and early 20th centuries accumulated complex webs of companies in family hands much as the livnáridanrinya would decades later, which is wholly unsurprising as many of the latter were sons and grandsons of the former.

The látuxarin, however, is a distinct and historically contingent phenomenon, a product of the unusual and difficult circumstances of the Kiravian Remnant and the manner in which its élite set out to harnass its few remaining advantages in order to give it a chance at survival.

Destructive as the unrest leading up to the Kiravian Civil War and the course of the war itself had been, the prolonged crisis gave Kiravia’s wealthier classes enough fear and uncertainty to move many of their assets overseas for safekeeping, and enough time to actually accomplish this. As early as Élív 1931 furniture, jewellery, objets d’art, bullion, and other sweet lucre from the stately manor houses of South Kirav began appearing on the wharves of Venceia in crates addressed to distant cousins of their owners who feared peasant revolts. By 1933 law and order had grown so fragile in the major cities and banditry so rampant in the hinterland that banks and endowed institutions were scrambling to move as much of their reserves as possible offshore. The Caphirian banking system, envy of the world, was the haven of choice for more liquid assets. That wealth which was tied up in chattels went, if at all possible, to the Colonies to avoid trouble with customs, though as the tide of the war turned more decisively against the Federalists the propertied classes did not hesitate to put their treasures and themselves on any ship with a berth, even if bound for Burgundie. This flurry of capital flight was of course a boon to bandits red and otherwise, and it was not uncommon for shipments to be stolen, lost in transit, or impounded by foreign authorities, but in the end a very significant share of the nation’s wealth had safely crossed the Odoneru before the Socialist victory in 1935.

After the failure of the Farravonian Counterrevolution and their final expulsion from the mainland, the Federalist government survived, but in a manifestly unenviable position. Having lost control (incomplete and unstable though it had been of late) of its metropolitan territory, the vast majority of its population, the lion’s share of its resources, and nearly all of its industrial base, the Federalists were left in possession of a constellation of colonies, most of them islands, scattered about the world. The fact that these colonies had little in the way of industry and therefore little in the way of an urban proletariat meant they had never wavered in their political loyalty, but it left the government to which they had been loyal with a limited capacity to defend them.

The Kiravian Remnant had natural resources, but not on the scale of any territorially-intact state. What it did have was a reasonably skilled and productive workforce, the goodwill of kindred nations and anti-communist powers, and a decent amount of capital.

Structure and Cohesion

The organisational and financial architecture of látuxarin vary. Some approximate the nested umbrella structure common among conglomerates internationally, but most are more complicated.

Identity and Culture

The entrenched familial character of the látuxarin, enhanced by the tendency of the founding families of a látuxarin to come from similar backgrounds to one another, has given many of the conglomerates a more adjective identity than would ordinarily be expected for a large corporate group.

Today most remaining látuxarin conduct business in Kiravic, the prevailing language of interstate commerce nationwide, but some continue to operate using the language of their founders, especially those that moved their headquarters to the Mainland after 1985 and settled in a region where that language is spoken.

The ties that látuxarin have with the foreign countries that contributed their initial capital to them continue to be significant. Conglomerates are known to lobby the Kiravian government heavily on relations with their benefactors’ country.

The prominence of Caphirian investors and people of Caphirian descent and affiliation in látuxarin has verbed a strong influence of Caphirian business culture on the Kiravian.

Founding Families

Látuxarin families were known during the remnant as the "founding families" or "new founding families" (inox livnáridanrinya). In the context of 1940s Æonara, this term carried additional meaning, as the aristocratic families descended from very early Kiravian colonists in Æonara also referred to themselves as the "founding families" (albeit in Æonaran Coscivian, gradnidarân). The use of the same term for the haute-bourgeois émigrés at the helm of the new industrial economy evoked the tensions of the era as the worlds of émigré-dominated state-capitalist New Æonara and the founding-family dominated agrarian Old Æonara collided.

See also

• Sodesteri