Almost certain Big D knew about it, Nath, since having a seat on the board means you get to know a LOT about what is going on inside a mega. Also, one of his bequests directly related to a virtual room in the SCIRE host that had Leonardo's notes on AI research.
I remembered Miles Lanier, while a member of the board, was kept in the dark about Brightlight association with Renraku (yes, I prefer to avoid calling him "Leonardo" to avoid confusion for the people who may not know that "Leonardo is
not Leonardo"). But that was because he was Miles Lanier, former head of Fuchi security. The random board member who had been with Renraku for years previously may have been taught about it (as I don't expect Dunkelzahn to have personally attended Renraku and Aztechnology boards).
On the other hand, the reward for information about room 1835 inside Renraku arcology in Seattle makes things much more complicated than they may appear on the surface. I can't decide where Steve Kenson stands between "merely good" and "so amazingly brilliant that it was lost on most of the audience" (though if you ask me, the real masterpiece would then be hidden in "Who watch the watchers?").
See, those two items are, on their most basic level, two separate plot seeds for SR authors and gamemasters to use. To Renraku and the world, it states that Dunkelzahn had shares and a seat on the board, and that he knows there's something significant inside room 1835. It
suggests he could have had access to any information given to the board, and that the
Draco Foundation does not know about the content of room 1835.
If Renraku board was given information about Brightlight work on the AEP, Renraku can either suppose that for an unknown reasons, either Dunkelzahn representative did not pass him the information, or Dunkelzahn did not pass it to the Draco Foundation. Or both Dunkelzahn and the Draco Foundation had the information, and the reward is just some test (not as silly as you may think, if you consider that room 1835 should have had the best Matrix defenses Brightlight could come up with, that may have been a way for the Draco Foundation to fin a decker able to past those elsewhere).
But it is equally possible that Renraku board was not given any specific information about Brightlight work on the AEP, and Dunkelzahn really was after information about the content of room 1835 (knowing it is related to Brightlight work, or simply aware that it benefited from some extraordinary security measures), as most people would assume when reading it.
Finally, the actual goal may only be to make Renraku reacts when the Will was read, to get a peek at what they do and who's involved.
As for Fuchi, they'd been at eachother's throats long before Blood in the Boardroom or Big D's death. And I think you're understating things when you say 'gentle pushes'. That was a sledgehammer to the kneecaps. Villiers is a longtime schemer. Didn't take a dragon to know that if he could find a way to be the one guy in charge of a megacorp instead of part of a triumvirate, he would jump at it if it had any chance at all of succeeding.
The thing is, nothing that Dunkelzahn did contributed to Villiers plan itself. He used his personal and familial fortune to fund the takeover of Fuchi Americas assets by Cambridge Holdings and Villiers International, and his position as head of Fuchi Americas to authorize the sales and hide them from Fuchi Industrial Electronics management. That's something he could have done at any point ever since 2038.
I can imagine it helped tricking Yamana and Nakatomi that they were more eager than ever to weaken Villiers division, and thus welcomed any report that Fuchi Americas was "streamlining its operations". Miles Lanier move to Renraku does little to nothing to contribute to the plan. Whether Villiers had the operation in mind for a long time or imagined it in the few months that followed the death of Dunkelzahn, all the dragon did was "pushing him off the cliff." Dunkelzahn may have been confident that Fuchi Industrial Electronics would not survive while Richard Villiers would find a way to, but ho he'd do it was entirely up to him (that is, unless Dunkelzahn secretly left him instructions).
