Jurg used to laugh about Upp Hall because Upp Hall was ‘absolutely stolen. For what it cost us and the way we got it, it’s been one of the most beautiful and satisfying deals’.
Bond friend, Tony Weatherald, 19961
Upp Hall is an ‘outstanding partly moated Elizabethan Manor House’ that sits in beautiful, rolling, green countryside less than an hour from London. The approach brings you up an avenue of lime trees which, as the brochures point out, is a classic introduction to a most impressive piece of real estate.
The house itself dates from the fifteenth century and is of Grade One historical interest, while the ‘very fine sporting estate’ boasts a ‘First-Class Shoot and Trout Fishing’. At today’s values, the freehold is worth around £5 million, or about $12.5 million.2
Despite being only fifty-five kilometres from the West End, the estate comes with a four-bedroom eighteenth-century farmhouse, seven cottages and a magnificent listed tithe barn, not to mention a tennis court, heated swimming pool, and a sixty-metre-by-thirty-metre riding school, which Alan Bond’s daughter Susanne used to train her showjumpers. Oh yes, and 400 hectares of prime English farmland.
Since the early 1980s, this magnificent mansion has been the Bond family seat in Britain, thanks to a tenancy that Susanne claimed she was granted by her father back in 1985. But in 1992, when Bond went bankrupt, it was supposedly owned by Alan’s good friend Jurg Bollag, out of reach of Bond’s creditors.
Bollag claimed that he had bought Upp Hall from one of Bond’s companies in 1987 for just under £2 million, yet had never bothered to live there because he had generously agreed that Susanne Bond should be allowed to occupy the house.
It seemed quite incredible that Bollag should have spent £2 million of his own money to buy a house for the Bonds to live in, and it was a story that Alan and Jurg would have found hard to sell to their mates in the public bar, but it was nevertheless the story that they chose to argue in court. And, of course, there were stacks of expensive legal documents to support their case.
The Upp Hall estate had originally been purchased in 1981 by a subsidiary of Bond Corporation called the Wydgee Pastoral Company, so it had been paid for at the outset by the shareholders of Bond’s public company. But in 1985, as a director of Wydgee, Alan had generously granted his daughter Susanne the right to live there rent-free for life.
It’s not at all clear how Bond thought he could justify giving Susanne the exclusive use of this asset, which had been bought with millions of dollars of other people’s money, but in 1991 Susanne swore an affidavit for a UK legal action in which she claimed that she had been given the tenancy in exchange for using her showjumping activities to promote the Wydgee Pastoral Company’s products.3
Now Wydgee has never quite become a household name in Australia or the UK—in fact, it’s only ever owned a few pine trees on a block of sand north of Perth—so Susanne must have had trouble with the job. But this is hardly surprising because Wydgee had no products to promote, and she was never the world’s most famous showjumper. She was on the fringe of the Australian team, rarely won on the international circuit and certainly never made the Olympics. And to cap it all, she didn’t wear the Wydgee name on her horses when she competed.
Susanne claimed that her other duties in return for this tenancy were to manage the army of cooks, cleaners, housekeepers and gardeners at Upp Hall, and to entertain Wydgee’s clients at pheasant shoots. But perhaps her most onerous task of all in running this lovely house was to provide for the care and training of her very valuable horses. Or should one say, Jurg Bollag’s.
Had this scandalous deal come to the attention of Bond Corporation’s auditors or shareholders, there’s little doubt that they would have regarded it as pretty lousy value for the near-£2 million it had cost them. And that is why, it seems, the Upp Hall estate had been sold in 1987. By taking it out of the public company, shareholders would no longer have cause to complain. So the lease was transferred to Bond’s private company Dallhold, which reaffirmed Susanne’s tenure, and the freehold was sold to a company called Lindsey Trading Properties which had been set up specially by Bollag to do the deal.
Lindsey’s home was a post office box in Panama, where its three Spanish-sounding directors hailed from the splendid law firm of Arosemena, Noriega & Contreras.
There were a number of things, however, that suggested the transaction was just a sham and that it was not really Bollag buying Upp Hall at all. First, his tax records in Zug made it perfectly clear that he did not have £2 million to his name, and certainly not to spend on others. Second, it made no sense at all for him to buy a hugely expensive property in the UK, when he lived in Switzerland and the Bond family had it locked up for life. And third, there were documents in Dallhold’s records that actually appeared to accept that he was buying it for Bond.
These documents, which were discovered by the Dallhold liquidator, John Lord, described the 1987 sale of Upp Hall as a transfer from Bond corporate to Bond private. Crucially, they also specified that a Bollag company was to be the purchaser. In other words, they suggested that Bollag was again acting as a cover for Bond and his family so that the property was not in their name.4
And this was clearly what Susanne believed back in May 1988 when she gave evidence to a New Jersey court, during her divorce from Armand Leone, swearing on oath that Upp Hall was ‘a rural property controlled by my family’5 (emphasis added).
Such, then, was the background in September 1991 when a legal battle over Upp Hall began in courts in Australia and the UK, with Bollag and his Panamanian company ranged against John Lord as Dallhold liquidator.
Dallhold’s interest in the property was that its UK subsidiary had been granted a lifetime lease in 1987, during the sale to Bollag, which was potentially worth £1 million or more to the company’s creditors back in Australia. This lease conveyed the right to farm the land at Upp Hall in perpetuity—and to occupy the house as well if Susanne Bond could be evicted— for as long as the company stayed alive.
But here was the problem: the lease would be worthless if Dallhold Estates UK could be wound up (or killed), which is exactly what Jurg Bollag was trying to do.
The legal action batted back and forth between Sydney and London during 1991 and 1992 with the initial victories going to Lord. And in the process Jurg Bollag was forced to reveal some remarkable information. When Dallhold in Australia had hit financial difficulties he had provided large amounts of cash to pay the Bonds’ bills at Upp Hall, including £2,500 for pheasants’ eggs that Susanne had ordered for a party.
Between May 1989 and July 1991, he had in fact coughed up £373,000 in fourteen separate instalments from an account at the Zuger Kantonal Bank in Zug, Switzerland. And although this was in his name, it was a pound to a penny that the money belonged to Bond. Best of all, the bank account number, 00-736-488-01, was shown clearly on the transfers.
Amazingly, however, this crucial piece of information was never passed on to Bob Ramsay when Bond went bankrupt in April 1992, even though it would have been an invaluable lead in hunting down cash that belonged to Bond. Nor did the Dallhold liquidator himself try to crack open the account.
In defence of John Lord and his team, who were running the Upp Hall action, they were drowning in documents at the time and were dealing with a million separate pieces of paper. But this incident highlights one of the great problems that dogged the search for Bond’s fortune, which was that information was often not shared between the three different teams of accountants and lawyers who were chasing him.6
Having won the first round of the legal battle for Upp Hall, which involved ensuring that Dallhold Estates UK stayed alive, Lord’s next aim was to get Susanne Bond evicted from the house, and in September 1992 a new round of legal action began in the UK to achieve this. By this time the courts had been told that there was no written record of Alan granting her a life tenancy, and Justice Chadwick, who had presided over the British hearings, had been scathing about her claim, saying it was likely to be struck out.7
But even if he was right in predicting another victory for Dallhold, it looked like being a long hard grind to get Susanne out, because she and Alan would both swear blind that the promise had been made. And Susanne was now bringing her own legal action in which she claimed that Dallhold’s agents had behaved so abominably that she deserved compensation. This would tie up the courts through 1993 and 1994 and, if necessary, for several years thereafter.
First of all, she said, they had made her pet Rottweiler go missing, causing her ‘much consternation and distress’. Next they had brought people to view Upp Hall, suggesting that it might be for sale. And finally, and most shocking of all, servants of Dallhold Estates UK had entered the property on one occasion and prevented her ‘from having access to the wine cellar thereof, thereby causing her distress and embarrassment in the presence of her guests’. The sum total of this was that she was demanding ‘exemplary and aggravated damages’ from the very company that had allowed her to live in the estate rent-free for the previous five years. The nerve of it was quite extraordinary.8
But so was the Upp Hall saga from the start. Tony Weatherald, who worked for Bond after he was made bankrupt, acting as a messenger between Bond and Bollag, told a journalist in 1996:
Jurg used to laugh about Upp Hall because Upp Hall was ‘absolutely stolen. For what it cost us and the way we got it, it’s been one of the most beautiful and satisfying deals. And they have got no hope of ever getting it back off us’.9
According to Weatherald, ‘Bollag always used to say us. He didn’t say Alan or the Bonds, he said us’. And this no doubt explains why Lindsey Trading Properties made several other generous contributions to the Bond family fortunes. In 1989, when times were hard, Bollag’s company lent Dallhold £3 million to bolster Bond Corporation’s share price, and in 1987 bought Alan’s luxury ski lodge in Vail Colorado for US$3 million.
Best of all, it lent $11.5 million to the Bond family trust company, Armoy, in June 1990 to buy Dallhold’s cattle and sheep properties at Dandaragan, north of Perth. This ensured that they stayed in the family, rather than going to creditors, at a time when the National Mutual Royal Bank was calling in its $7 million loan and Dallhold was on the brink of collapse.
As usual, Bollag was quite astonishingly decent about it all. At a time when the market rate of interest was 18 per cent, he allowed Lindsey to lend money to the Bonds at 3 per cent, and failed to take any security, even though farm prices were falling.10
Nor did it seem that any of this money could be recovered. The legal actions over Upp Hall dragged through the courts during 1993 and 1994, with John Lord having to fight all the way to the House of Lords to ensure that Dallhold Estates UK did not get thrown off the property by having its lease terminated. The battle to evict Susanne was finally ready to go to court in late 1994, but by this time Bond was busy negotiating a settlement with his creditors.
By then, it was just one of a number of legal actions that Lord was planning against Bollag and the Bond family, but it was not going to come cheap. The Upp Hall case alone was forecast to cost £175,000, which creditors would have to gamble to win the prize.11
As so often with Bond, the battle turned into a high-stakes game of poker, where Alan seemed to have more nerve and more money than his creditors.