Q: So you had no involvement with the setting up of any trusts for Mr Bond?
A: No, not at all …
Bond’s family lawyer, Harry Lodge, on oath, July 19931
Despite his denials, it was Harry Lodge who had sounded the trumpet to establish Bond’s offshore empire in the first place. Or so Geoffrey Davies told Jersey’s Royal Court in November 1993:
A:
I first became involved with Alan Bond and his affairs when I was instructed by Harry Lodge, who was then a partner in Parker & Parker, resident in London, to form a company called Pianola in 1978 or 1979.
Q:
Was he the family lawyer? Was that his role?
A:
I had that impression.2
Harry Lodge had phoned Davies out of the blue in 1979 and arranged to fly down to St Helier from London. Soon afterwards, on his instructions, Touche Ross had set up a Jersey company called Pianola and an accompanying trust, the Juniper Trust, so that Bond could own a £1.5 million property in Belgrave Mews without risking UK Capital Gains Tax. The funds to set up these two entities had been sent over from Parker & Parker’s client account in Perth.
Harry Lodge had been asked about Juniper four months earlier by Ramsay’s counsel Peter Macliver, and had denied on oath having anything to do with it.
Q:
Was this Juniper Trust of Mr Bond’s something that you had set up?
A:
No, I had not set it up …
Q:
So you had no involvement with the setting up of any trusts for Mr Bond?
A:
No, not at all …
Q:
You didn’t instruct anyone to set up that trust?
A:
No, no.3
Lodge had then been asked several times about the Icarus Trust and had said variously that it didn’t ring a bell, that he was not familiar with it, knew nothing about it, and had never heard of it. In fact, he denied all knowledge of it:
Q:
And the Icarus Trust. Are you familiar with that trust?
A:
No, no …
Q:
Is that not one of the trusts in respect of which you were a contact?
A:
No, I’m sure it wasn’t. But if it was, I’ve never heard of it.4
But in Jersey in November 1993, this testimony was directly challenged. For not only was Geoffrey Davies pointing the finger at Lodge, but Touche Ross’s files contained a letter that Harry himself had signed in January 1983 instructing the trustees of the very same Icarus Trust to consult him at regular intervals about who the beneficiaries should be, how the funds should be invested, and how income and assets of the trust should be distributed. And on the bottom of this letter, Lodge had added a message in his own handwriting that said: ‘After the date of my death or upon my earlier advice to you that I can no longer continue my consultation duties, please consult with John Bond’.5
Since Ramsay’s investigators had been unaware of this treasure trove when they examined Lodge in Perth in July 1993, they had not given Bond’s lawyer nearly as tough a time as he deserved. But they had uncovered one valuable piece of evidence to throw at him.
In October 1984, Lodge had gone to Jersey for a second time to update the arrangements he had made for Bond and to monitor progress. And on that occasion, he had scribbled four pages of notes of his conversation with Geoffrey Davies on Touche Ross’s notepaper. These jottings mentioned all Bond’s key companies, including Kirk, Juniper, Pianola, Icarus, Engetal and The Enterprise, and referred to houses, bearer shares and transactions that Lodge appeared to have discussed in detail.
This incriminating document had been tucked away in Parker & Parker’s files during the 1980s in a folder labelled ‘Bond A: Reorganisation Private Affairs’. But it had been discovered by Bob Ramsay’s team shortly after Bond’s bankruptcy. And it now proved to be at least a partial cure for Harry Lodge’s amnesia.
Lodge had at first disclaimed any knowledge of Alan Bond’s financial affairs offshore, and had affected not to know whether he had any. He had also specifically denied having set up companies for Bond offshore or giving instructions to others to do so. And when asked about the October 1984 meeting, he had claimed that he couldn’t remember it.
But when his handwritten notes were placed in front of him he was forced to summon up his powers of recall. Yes, he had been to Jersey. Yes, it could have been on 26 October 1984. Yes, he’d popped down on the plane in the morning with one of the Bond Corporation executives. And yes, he had met with the accountants from Touche Ross in St Helier. But he couldn’t remember why he had made the trip, although he was rather partial to the local asparagus.
Certainly, he agreed, the four pages of notes were in his handwriting. But he didn’t know why he had headed them ‘A. Bond’. And as for the Panamanian trusts, Liberian companies and Isle of Man shareholders whose names he had jotted down, well, he couldn’t recall what that had been about at all. Except that he was quite sure he had had nothing to do with establishing them.
He was aware, he admitted, that several of Bond Corporation’s directors had set up trusts in Jersey to hold their offshore assets, and now that he thought about it, he recalled overhearing that one called Juniper had been set up for Alan Bond. But he hadn’t done it himself. He was quite certain about that.
So why had he gone down there? Here Lodge’s efforts to find an excuse were like a schoolboy trying to explain why he didn’t have his homework.
First there was the palaver with checking his passport to see whether he had been in the UK at the time. Then there was a long blank look at his notes, which had meant nothing to him at all. And now there was a lame effort to explain why he might have gone to Jersey in the first place.
A:
Well, I think I went down with one of the Bond directors to talk about his affairs.
Q:
Sorry, to talk about whose affairs? Mr Bond’s?
A:
No, no. I didn’t go down to see him about Mr Bond, because I had nothing to do with that— that trust concept of theirs—maybe he was just telling me. I mean he did tell me that Mr Bond had flown through on his aeroplane once … But I don’t know whether he was filling me in just because I came from here. He knew that I did work for Bond. I just made notes of it in case anyone asked me.6
Gradually the details began to come back to him. Yes. He remembered better now: one of the Bond directors, Peter Mitchell, had said he was going down to Jersey, so he had decided to go along for the ride and have a spot of lunch. Plus he could meet his old friend Geoffrey Davies (whom he had practically denied knowing a few minutes earlier). And that was really about all that happened. They’d had a brief little meeting, a bit of lunch and tootled off back to London again.
Yes, but what about these notes? How had they come about? Had he gone along with Mitchell to talk about Bond’s affairs?
A:
No, not at all. No not at all.
Q:
Well, this first sheet of yours is headed A. Bond.
A:
Mm.7
Well, why on earth had an accountant in Jersey told him all these intimate details about Bond’s affairs if he wasn’t acting as Bond’s lawyer, hadn’t gone there to talk about Bond, and had nothing to do with it anyway? Well, that was a hard one. But Lodge had to speculate that Davies was telling him all this because he knew that Lodge came from Western Australia. And he had jotted it all down, meaningless as it was, just in case anyone in Western Australia should ever ask him what these jolly nice Jersey chaps were doing for Alan.
Harry Lodge OBE retired from legal practice in 1989, but is well known about town as a respectable, conservative gentleman, and pillar of the local Liberal party. In 1995, his role in setting up Bond’s offshore empire was exposed by the author of this book in The Australian newspaper, along with his protestations that he had had nothing to do with it. Shortly afterwards, he wrote to the newspaper to complain. But all he succeeded in doing was to admit most of what he had so strenuously denied on oath two years earlier.8
By the time he wrote to The Australian, Lodge had recalled that he had been to Jersey in 1979 to set up the Juniper Trust and Pianola for Alan Bond. He remembered, too, after all these years, that he had visited Jersey in October 1984 and had taken notes of a conversation with Davies ‘concerning mutual clients’. He also accepted that he had consented to act as someone from whom the trustees of the Juniper Trust, the Icarus Trust, and possibly others could take instructions. His vindication, he made it clear, lay in the fact that he had never been consulted.
Memory, of course, is a funny thing, especially as you grow older. But Harry Lodge must consider himself lucky that he was not pursued under section 77C of the Bankruptcy Act, which makes it an offence punishable by up to twelve months in prison to withhold information from a trustee in bankruptcy. For, in initially denying on oath that he had anything to do with the Juniper or Icarus trusts, he had arguably done just this.
It is possible, however, that Lodge knew even more about Bond’s offshore affairs than he was prepared to admit to The Australian. In the mid-1980s, for example, he went to a series of meetings with Bond’s tax adviser from Price Waterhouse, Geoff Mews, and Bond’s managing director at Dallhold, Robert Pearce, to discuss Bond’s personal financial affairs.
Lodge also billed Dallhold in November 1988 for: ‘Attendances and advices on … Mr Bollag concerning financing of Mr Bond’s art collection’.9
This was barely three years before Bond denied, whilst Parker & Parker were still acting for him, that Kirk Holdings or Jurg Bollag had ever bought or paid for any paintings on his behalf.
Lodge was also heavily involved in the drafting of Bond’s will or wills, and in January 1987 prepared an internal memo for Parker & Parker concerning Alan Bond, in which he wrote:
Consideration should be given to the possibility of making wills in other jurisdictions and confining our present will to dealing only with Australian assets. For instance, there could be a will in the United Kingdom, one in the United States and one in any other place that might seem appropriate.10
Harry Lodge would quite probably also have seen a file note prepared by Anne Duncan of Parker & Parker on 8 September 1987 in which she recorded that Alan Bond had indicated to her that he had: ‘Some concern that his will made no mention of his international assets’.11
To answer Bond’s concerns, Parker & Parker subsequently advised Robert Pearce at Dallhold that further wills should be prepared for property held outside Australia. And on 15 October 1987, Pearce replied that separate wills would be drafted. Sure enough, Bond’s subsequent Australian will, which was found in Parker & Parker’s files in 1992, stated clearly:
… this will … shall affect only my real and personal property in the Commonwealth of Australia, and shall not affect any of my real or personal property in any other part of the world other than the Commonwealth of Australia.12
Bond was asked on two occasions by Bob Ramsay during 1992 whether he had a will that covered his overseas assets, and on each occasion replied that he had neither a will nor assets offshore. He also denied having bank accounts overseas, with the exception of one at Arbuthnot Latham in London in the name of Dallhold (which was not the account in his own name, c/o Jurg Bollag, that had secretly received several million dollars from Kirk Holdings).
Bond’s denials about bank accounts, overseas assets, offshore companies and wills were certainly made while Parker & Parker were still acting for him. Even if his answer relating to offshore wills was in fact correct, it is very hard to see how they could have been satisfied that Bond had no offshore assets or bank accounts, particularly since they received hundreds of thousands of dollars from a Swiss bank account held by Juno Equities to pay Alan Bond’s legal fees.
After the Jersey evidence became public in May 1994, Parker & Parker must surely have known the history of Juno Equities, Touche Ross, Bond’s Jersey companies, and Harry Lodge’s role in setting them up—assuming that they didn’t already know via Lodge himself or their own records. Yet they continued to act for Bond and echo his denials even after this date. And to charge large amounts of money for doing so.
To put it mildly, it was really quite remarkable.