[BE] How we screwed up in the negociations

Day 891, 05:47 • Published in Belgium United Kingdom • by Apotygma


Dear Belgians

We all know that nowadays the situation in our dear country isn’t going that well. I am not only talking about IG, but mostly IRL. BHV is a mess and this is done by mostly a lack of willingness of our government.

I think a lot of you know that not so long ago we were ripped of the eUNL after months of a peaceful merger to prevent a Spanish PTO. Not so long ago I wrote an article summing up what happened to our country over the last few month (nearly years now). All new players should check it out in order for you to understand what happened : http://www.erepublik.com/en/article/the-history-of-our-country-1150784/1/20 . But what does this have to do with the negotiations with the eUNL.

eUNL has been a dear friend since the start, they merged with us when we needed them, they helped us while we were under the occupation of “The Group”. Even after the independence, they kept helping us by lending us training companies to help our skill 0’s, training companies that are STILL employing nearly 300 citizens nowadays !

We have to admit that at the beginning, when the Belgian government started to talk about a split of the belongings or wealth that was generated during the union, they where septic and they refused to give us something except the two companies. Discussions were engaged to get more, but let’s face it : We screwed up.

Nearly 1 month later, we are now nearly at the same point than we started. We screwed this up big time. How? I’ll let you formulate your own ideas about who is guilty by presenting you some hard facts that can be gathered. I’ll try to stay as objective as possible, but, as a lot of you, I am disappointed in some people and I may let my ideas transpire a little too much sometimes.

1. Exactly one month ago

It is true that a sort of negotiations started a while ago, but we can hardly name them negotiations. In fact : nothing happened from our side, they were talking already about what they would give us, but we did nothing. The first action that was taken out of our government was to steal the companies out of and eUNL org in order for us to force them to give them to us. This was done by our former Head of training companies : Runs.

It had the desired effect : talks started but on a very wrong foot. They where septic and all the trust we had for each other disappeared in 10 seconds. But, talks started and we managed through a lot of campaigning and talking behind the screens to restore the trust slowly. Olv007, ThomasRED and me did everything we could to help our government to pull this off. We managed to convince them to negotiate even if they weren’t incline to discuss with RL Americans.

Their first proposal was :

Option 1: They buy the companies for 50 gold and we don't split any other belongings.

Option 2: They return the companies and we start proper negotiations to split belongings.

We didn’t reply to this and we screwed up a second time. We managed to fix this, once again.

2. 29th of March



This is when the second phase of the negotiations started, thanks to our talks they accepted that we made our own proposal. This was made by Manong and Romper, both named by Eleyna after the mistake Runs made.

The proposal was as followed :

a. We request a full 50% division of the 33,000 BEF and any other monetary account that may apply. We also request a full 50% division in acquisition and rights for all the companies that may apply. Any companies in our possession will be kept by us, but we, the government of eBelgium, will compensate the government of eNetherlands by paying half of the companies' worth (25 gold for the two companies in our possession) thus eNetherlands will also compensate the government of eBelgium by paying us half of the companies (that may apply) in their possession's worth. And due to the unreasonable behavior that our former representatives of the past negotiations presented, we are also more than willing to pay an additional fee of 25 gold.

OR

b. We return the two Q1 companies in our possession but receive the full 50% of the 33,000 BEF and any other monetary account that may apply and also the full 50% division of the remaining companies' worth that may apply. We are also, still, more than willing to pay the additional fee of 25 gold due to the unreasonable behavior that our former representatives of the past negotiations presented.

Most of it was based on a rough estimate of the belongings made by me. This proposal was considered as offensive by the eUNL government. After 2 month of separation and having heard nothing from us (despite a deadline), we requested 50% of their assets representing thousands of gold.

Again, me, ThomasRED, Olv007 and supported by some constructive eUNL representatives, we managed to keep the negotiations going. It was going to be tough to get anything at all, they even accused us of stealing a 3de company from them. They even requested Manong and Romper to be removed as they considered them to pro-EDEN and that they might start an anti-eUNL campaign. (Deviltje's article)

They also reacted by give us their first proposal : NL has proposed to give the eBelgian government 50 gold and two companies

3. 6 April



Whatever we tried, the negotiation sphere was bad. The country president didn’t appreciate it and Deviltje resigned as negotiator exactly the same day that Reaussou presented himself to the eUNL as a newly appointed negotiator.

The atmosphere was thence, nothing was done to improve it from our side and neither was done out of theirs. I proposed to give back the 2 companies to the eUNL to show our good intentions and get back from a good foot. It was already clear that we would get this 2 companies anyway, and this wasn’t such a bad move. But this proposal was shot down by the same that where leading our country/negotiations and it got forgotten by our congressmen and we had to start back from nothing.

4. 13 April

Here is an article presenting what came out from the work from Reaussou, in fact, he did a good job talking with them, but made some faults by even forgetting to mention and to talk with Ragoth. Our own CP wasn’t informed of what was going on. Simple miscommunication.

It is hard to say, but apparently he didn’t like his job enough. He ensured us he was assembling information from all persons, ex-eUNLers, people we (ThomasRED, Olv007 and me) knew that would help us. But it now seems that the facts are different. I spoke to Deviltje to discover why our country failed in this negotiations and it seems that the spreadsheet that was presented to us by Reaussou was one set up a 100% BY the eUNL and not by him, as he presented it. Devilitje told me he only took the information eUNL gave him and set up a spreadsheet on his own with obscure percentages. When he quite, we still wonder why, he left us with nothing. We only had the spreadsheets of eUNL and had to trust what they gave us. We also heard that more information was given to him about the profit and expenses of the union over a 3 months, nothing of this was ever shown to congress or government.

We were basically left at the point we where 2 weeks ago and had to tryst the spreadsheet set up by the eUNL. A one drastically different from the one Reaussou set up. What did he discuss about? How did he gather the data he used in his spreadsheet? Where others aware of what was going on? Still wondering.

THIS ISN’T ALL ! By appointing a new negotiator that was already an insider we could have managed to get more out of this. Apparently Ragoth asked Zarsky to continue , this one refused finding himself not suited. What did happen after that? Nothing and we where AGAIN back where we started.

5. 21th of April

One week after Reaussou left us, nothing happened and the negotiations where back where we stared. eUNL, to show us good signs and their willingness to keep good relations gave us this final proposal.

As you can read, they propose : 50 gold + 2 companies.

Yes, you read it right : the same proposal they made 1 month ago. Why? This is not because they are against us or jerks like some of us could call them. No. They have been more than reasonable over the last weeks and we can only pay for our own mistakes. We gave power to people we could not trust at the end, while others just made mistakes or bad decisions.

The only regret I can have is that with all the time some of the main headpersons for BfB (ThomasRED, Olv007 and me) that all this time got wasted. This because congress/government/CP were unable to name the right persons, even if they were from another side (PHX/EDEN/Neutral). I even wonder why none of us (ThomasRED? Olv007 or me) was asked to be negotiators. WE had the intelligence, we had the connections to pull this off quickly. Why? Why? And, some may say : you where asked. No I wasn’t, It was 1 post on the forum when it was already to late.

This is what you should ask yourself during the following elections. Why did FB (main party in congress) refuse to name someone from BfB that they named pro-PHX? Why did Res Belgica also forget to do this? They knew we were involved, that we were the most qualified. Why?

I am only left with questions, as I am certain we could have get some hundreds of gold if we did this well. Enough gold to revive our economy, to ensure our TW for a month or two, get new companies to get a stable income. Just a waist…