Before working on Bespin, Arend and his family were
wealthy investors in a subsidiary branch of the Bank
of the Core specializing in venture capital. One of their
clients, a commissioner in the Imperial Trade and Commerce Authority named Marus Grayson, headed a business enterprise that flopped. Rather than going bankrupt with debt to the bank, he used his connections in
the Imperial Bureaucracy and COMPNOR to freeze and
later seize the branch's assets in connection with allegations of treason, effectively ruining the Shen family.