The juxtaposition was evidently intended to suggest that the talk of large sums was a ruse to advance the Western plot.
Its standard Western plot concerned a battle over land between outlaws and ranchers.
The troubles of the Russian space industry: the result of a Western plot?
There is the Western plot to divide the Muslim world.
Such musings can resonate in a society rife with paranoid suspicions about Western plots.
Western plots were not recent but hundreds of years old:
He began to criticize conservatives who obsessed over Western "plots" to topple Communism through "peaceful evolution."
Some within and without the Parliament argue that marketization is a Western plot to weaken the Russian state.
The 1968 invasion, the paper said, thwarted a Western plot "to destabilize Czechoslovakia."
This fare, added to his natural paranoia, served to convince the Shah that there really had been a Western plot against him.