I think you are spot-on...I was just sitting here thinking about it, when your comment popped up, that was an awful lot of money, regardless where the author might have been born, and writers out of African countries weren’t exactly as rare as diamonds...it looks more like a form of money-laundering.
If Ayres needed to be paid, how would they go about it? Sniff sniff...Channel it through the fictitious author? Wild guess.
Money laundering was my first thought ..but why? What did he do with that amount of money. He certainly didn’t have any material things to show for it....could have gone up in smoke.. .
Sometime when a political person writes a books, a union a non-political individual buys multiple copies to distribute or put money in the candidates pocker. Candidate cn become very rich over night.
Can the source of this money be traced?