He has experienced public and private shame, humiliation, guilt and public harassment … he is overeating, he suffers persistent insomnia … he contemplates suicide.
Dr William Barclay on Bond, February 19941
Bob Ramsay had originally sought a Federal Court order to examine Bond on oath in December 1992, on the grounds that Alan had given him unsatisfactory answers to a whole series of key questions.
In particular, Bond had denied having overseas assets, overseas bank accounts or an overseas will, despite a mass of evidence to the contrary. A series of letters had then been exchanged in which Ramsay had produced more and more material to suggest that Bond was lying, but the obfuscation and denials had continued, and finally the two men had met face to face in Bird Cameron’s offices in Melbourne, where Bond told Ramsay point blank: ‘I will not have any discussion with you or answer any of your questions on an on-the-record basis’.2
The Federal Court had immediately ordered Bond to undergo a section 81 examination in which he could be forced to answer Ramsay’s questions or be thrown into prison— either for contempt of court or for offences against the Bankruptcy Act which carried a maximum penalty of twelve months jail.
This examination would also put him in danger of perjury charges that could see him behind bars for five years if he gave false answers. So in theory he would have only one way out, which was to tell the truth and admit that Bollag was hiding millions of dollars for him in bank accounts in Switzerland.
The problem was that it looked like being a nightmare to get Bond into the witness box. The scheduled examination in February 1993 had been cancelled because he had been rushed into hospital for open-heart surgery. And now in November 1993, as Ramsay tried to nail down a new date, Bond and his lawyers were arguing that he was mentally unfit to take the stand because he had lost his memory.
Initially, their pitch was that Alan’s amnesia had been caused by brain damage suffered during his heart operation. Later, the blame was shifted onto depression and anxiety. But either way, the aim of it all seemed pretty transparent. With the bankruptcy more than halfway through its normal three-year term, Bond would be able to escape interrogation completely if he could just keep Ramsay at bay for a year or so. And medical arguments about the mysteries of Bond’s brain were quite capable of lasting that long.3
The basis of the case was that Bond’s brain had been damaged when his aorta had been clamped for two-and-a-half hours to divert blood around his heart while surgeons fitted a new heart valve. In roughly one case in ten, the experts said, this caused small bubbles of air, or micro-embolisms, to enter the brain. And this, they argued, had happened to Bond.
But there were huge problems with this scenario. First of all, this type of brain damage was usually very minor. Second, it was pretty crazy to suggest that Bond could have forgotten that he had hidden millions of dollars offshore. Third, his operation had gone smoothly and been judged a success. Fourth, and worst of all, the public had not been given the slightest sign that there was anything wrong with him after his operation. Indeed, the evidence suggested that he had been bursting with health.
Three months after his heart operation, Alan had been filmed at his daughter Jody’s wedding looking a million dollars. His face had been plump, his skin rosy and shiny, and there had been a huge smile on his face. And he had actually told a TV interviewer happily that he felt ‘very well’. Rest, he said, had done the trick.
At around the same time he had been photographed by Woman’s Day on the beach near his home, and judged by observers to be in great shape:
He looks a little trimmer, more taut, and he’s obviously feeling terrific. Fallen tycoon Alan Bond, who underwent open-heart surgery in February— an operation doctors predicted would take six months to recover from—appeared to be sparking on all cylinders as he took a brisk walk and a paddle on the beach near his home in Cottesloe, WA, recently.
… As our exclusive pictures show, his glowing tan is back—along with the smile and style with the ladies. And there’s definitely more pep in his step.4
Lee Tate, the man who sneaked the photographs, reckoned Bond was ‘his normal robust, chatty self’. Alan, he said, had been dancing around the beach like he was ‘spring-heeled’ and had then swum 500 metres in the surf. ‘He just can’t help himself.’
A month later, in June 1993, when Bond was charged with a $15 million fraud over Manet’s painting La Promenade, he again seemed to be in tip-top mental shape. He walked briskly and cheerily into East Perth Magistrates’ Court, looking as feisty as ever. And when I approached him outside the courtroom, he had no difficulty remembering me or in threatening me with a lawsuit.
Three months after that, on the tenth anniversary of his America’s Cup win, he was quite well enough to give long interviews to Perth’s Sunday Times and Channel 9. He told them he had gaps in his memory about the victory, as most people would ten years after the event, yet looked perfectly fit and well. Channel 9’s reporter, Liam Bartlett, came away convinced that the energetic entrepreneur was in top form, and later told Ramsay’s lawyers: ‘The interview with Bond lasted about one-and-a-half hours. Mr Bond seemed to be his normal self and sharp as a tack mentally’.5
Around this time, an enthusiastic Bond was seen roaring round Sydney with Diana Bliss, attending a series of highly public opening-night performances. In early December 1993, a Sydney gossip columnist reported him to be ‘looking dangerously well’ outside the Sheraton Wentworth, brandishing a fistful of dollars to anyone who could find him a cab, and announcing to anyone who would listen: ‘I’ve a plane to catch. Doesn’t anyone round here want to work?’.6
Yet despite this apparent rude health Bond and his lawyers were claiming that he was too sick to instruct them, and that his memory was so shattered that he could not possibly take the stand in court.
Bond had first started to complain that he was losing his memory back in April 1993, when he had told his GP that it was getting so bad that he had become lost driving round the streets of Perth. On a couple of occasions, he said, he had forgotten the names of old friends. His GP had referred him to a top Perth neurologist, Dr William Carroll, who diagnosed Bond as having a mild form of brain damage presumed to be caused by a micro-embolism. But Carroll had emphasised that an electroencephalogram (EEG) of Bond’s brain showed ‘only very minimal changes’, while a high-tech Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scan showed ‘no major structural lesions’. He had also advised Bond that his condition was likely to improve, and told him that it was not serious enough to merit treatment. Finally, he had reassured Alan’s lawyers that it would not prevent Bond from briefing them.7
Shortly afterwards, Alan took himself to a forensic psychologist in Melbourne who made his living by giving expert evidence in court cases. Tim Watson-Munro saw Bond six times in the next four months and concluded that he was anxious, depressed, fragile, vulnerable, suicidal and suffering from cognitive and memory impairment.
In October, this same psychologist was asked by Bond’s lawyers to give an opinion on whether Bond was mentally fit to face a trial or a section 81 examination. He wrote back to say that it would be beyond Bond’s ‘level of emotional and cognitive capacity’ to brief counsel and that it might seriously worsen his condition if Alan was forced to go into the witness box:
Given his poor capacity to recall and his current tendency to muddle even simple logical sequencing, I suspect that he would have immense difficulty in coping with both examination-in-chief and cross-examination, and that should he be placed in a stressful situation in the witness box, there will be aggravation of cognitive deficits to the point of him possibly breaking down.8
This of course was exactly what the lawyers were looking for. Better still, the good doctor told them Bond had little chance of a quick recovery:
I believe it is unlikely that there will be any significant improvement in his functioning for at least six months and, regrettably, if the suspected brain damage is confirmed, Mr Bond’s current level of reduced cognitive functioning may well prove to be permanent.9
Even more usefully, Watson-Munro reported that he had submitted Bond to an intelligence test that revealed his IQ to be only ninety, or lower than average for the population at large. And on this evidence, he concluded, Bond must have been so severely brain-damaged by his heart operation that his IQ had dropped at least thirty points.
This was a pretty remarkable allegation for Watson-Munro to make, but it was even more remarkable that he did not have a jot of evidence to support it. He had not looked at the ECG showing Bond’s brain damage to be minimal. Nor had he obtained previous IQ-test results for Bond as a comparison. Instead, he had assumed that no one with an IQ as low as ninety could possibly have run a large multinational corporation, and had then swallowed a series of stories about Bond’s childhood brilliance which were an absolute fantasy.
Alan had boasted to the gullible expert that he had studied five languages as a child, excelled at mathematics, taken accountancy at night school and been so proficient at signwriting that he had completed his apprenticeship eighteen months early. But none of these tall tales was true.
Poor Alan had in fact suffered an inglorious childhood in the UK and Australia, in which he had been neither smart nor popular, and had later invented a more colourful history in which he had achieved great success. In the various versions that Bond had offered to interviewers over the years he had boasted of winning a Latin competition at the age of eight or of being sent to a school for exceptionally gifted children, and had always awarded himself an outstanding level of achievement in books and business.
In truth, however, young Bond had not been so much a brilliant student as one of the dullest. In 1949 he had failed his 11-Plus exam in England, which was an IQ test pure and simple, and had been despatched to a secondary-modern school, where the least intelligent children ended up. Even there he had obviously been no star pupil, because his fellow classmates remembered him as ‘thick’. He had also played truant.10
Alan had certainly not studied five languages at that school or any other, and his first Australian employer, Fred Parnell, judged famously that he ‘could hardly speak English’. As Fred recalled it, Alan’s spelling as a fifteen-year-old apprentice sign-writer had been ‘just dreadful’. On one occasion he had left a note to say that a customer in ‘South Terris’ wanted ‘two moor signs’; on another, an angry shopkeeper had complained that Bond had painted the word ‘business’ wrongly on his shop front.11
Nor had Alan’s command of the written word improved in the 1990s. Five months before the heart operation had supposedly damaged his brain, he had been asked by Bob Ramsay whether he was a beneficiary of any trust, and had written back to say that he was possibly a beneficiary of some associated with his ‘familey’, as suggested in his ‘statment’ of affairs, but he couldn’t be sure because he didn’t have ‘copie’s’ of the documents. When asked about details of his salary at Bond Corporation, Alan had told Ramsay to consult the ‘scheduals’ or, as he later put it, the ‘scheduale’.12
It was quite possible, of course, that Bond was dyslexic, but that didn’t alter the fact that his brilliant career, which had so impressed Watson-Munro, was a tissue of lies. His claim that he had completed his signwriting apprenticeship in record time was also a fiction. Bond had in fact been asked to leave by Fred Parnell because he was taking too many days off and was suspected of poaching Fred’s customers.
What Bond also hadn’t told Watson-Munro or anybody else was that he had notched up a lengthy criminal record as a juvenile. At the tender age of fourteen, young Alan had been convicted for stealing and unlawful entry and sentenced to two years in a juvenile institution. And four years later, as an eighteen-year-old, he had again been convicted of unlawful entry after being arrested as he attempted to break into a house in Fremantle. The Western Australian Police Gazette of 1952 even carried a segment devoted to young Bond’s burgeoning career as a delinquent, complete with fingerprints and mug shots of Alan in his school uniform.13
Watson-Munro could have discovered much of this by reading The Rise and Fall of Alan Bond, but this would have rendered his ‘expert’ evidence less favourable to his client. Instead, he had taken Bond’s stories at face value.
The other ‘expert’ writing sick notes for Bond in late 1993 was a Perth surgeon called John Saunders, who was also one of Alan’s personal friends. Saunders was neither a psychiatrist nor a neurologist, nor even Bond’s regular doctor, so his qualifications to talk about Bond’s brain were not immediately obvious, yet he was able to state confidently that Bond was so ill that he might never be able to go into court:
From the information before me and personal observation, I do not believe that Mr Bond has the ability to fully and adequately instruct anyone in relation to the proceedings against him. As to when he may be fit to do so, only time will tell. It is now ten months since his surgery. There seems to be no improvement in these problems and no likelihood of any improvement in the foreseeable future.14
Saunders’s main claim to being an expert on Bond’s mental state was that he had known him for many years and now saw him in a distressed state. But it was remarkable that any court could have even considered him to be an expert on brain damage, depression or amnesia, because he was clearly none of these. Yet he was allowed to deliver the killer punch for Bond’s lawyers by stating that there was ‘no doubt’ that Bond had suffered brain damage and that this appeared to be the cause of his memory problems.
The first opportunity to try out this ‘expert’ medical evidence came in December 1993 when Bond’s lawyers went to court in Perth to ask for his trial on the $15 million Manet fraud charges to be delayed. Their star witness, Watson-Munro, was flown across from Melbourne at Bond’s expense to tell the magistrate that his patient was suffering from stress, anxiety and depression, had contemplated suicide, and was ‘fragile and vulnerable’. Bond, said Watson-Munro, was also possibly suffering from brain damage, and was now so cerebrally challenged that he would ‘have difficulty running a corner store’. On hearing this, the magistrate, Graeme Calder, understandably delayed hearing of the charges until July 1994.15
Bond did not attend court that morning, so did not hear the claims that he was suicidal. But Perth’s journalists certainly did, and there was therefore a huge crowd waiting for him down in Fremantle, where he had agreed to show the media round the replica of the Endeavour, which Bond Corporation had helped to build. Most had agreed not to ask questions about his court case, but a young journalist from Channel 9, Ros Thomas, was keen to get a grab from him and felt herself to be under no obligation to keep off the subject.
Ros had been drinking in a Perth wine bar with Alan Bond only a couple of nights earlier, and he had not struck her as remotely likely to top himself. He had been extremely talkative and interested in her, which may have had something to do with the fact that she was a gorgeous young blonde woman. And he now greeted her like a long-lost friend:
He came out of the door and saw me and, I’ll never forget it, he gave me this big smile and then I thought, ‘Right, time to ask the questions’. So I started talking to him as he was walking. I just remember saying, ‘Mr Bond, why would your defence counsel say you’re suicidal? What would give him that impression? Is it something you’ve told him?’. He didn’t say a word. He had a grimace on his face. The smile had vanished and he was starting to look pretty peeved.16
Ros Thomas was not only convinced from her own encounter with Alan that there was nothing much wrong with him, but had also heard stories of him jogging on the beach and living it up in restaurants. So she figured he might be faking it when he appeared grey and listless in court. Besides, this was the biggest news of the day because his criminal trial had just been put off for six months. She kept walking beside him as they crossed the car park, asking why he hadn’t responded, until suddenly he lost his temper in spectacular fashion:
I was walking and saying to him ‘Are you going to answer my questions Mr Bond?’. I must have said it about four or five times, and he just turned around and grabbed the mike and just pitched it, and it went flying over two or three cars. I thought he was going to punch me or slap my face but he just threw the mike and kept on walking. Then he got into the car, slammed the door and drove off. He didn’t say a word to me that whole time, he just spat it.17
Bond’s efforts to use brain damage as an excuse to stay out of court did not, however, get such an easy ride from his would-be bankruptcy examiners. By the end of 1993, Bob Ramsay had assembled his own team of experts to probe Bond’s brain and was getting ready to fight the issue in the Federal Court. Meanwhile, Justice Sheppard, who had been hearing all matters relating to Bond’s bankruptcy, appeared to be losing patience. In December 1993, a week after the Perth magistrate had accepted that Bond was too sick to stand trial, Sheppard ordered him to be examined by two neurological experts chosen by Ramsay.
On 7 January 1994, Bond therefore presented himself at the Perth consulting rooms of a neuro-psychologist called Michael Hunt, who was acknowledged to be a leading expert in assessing brain-damage victims.
Hunt may well have suspected that Bond was malingering, or perhaps he just probed deeper than Alan’s doctors had done, but he soon managed to upset his patient. Before an hour was up, the once-great entrepreneur started to shake, complained of a splitting headache, burst into tears and declared he couldn’t go on. As he fled from the building, he was approached by a process server and flew into a rage. Later, he explained why he had snapped:
I was upset … I wasn’t well at all. I felt awful. He started yelling at me. I lost control of myself and went for him to push him away, to get him to leave. I started shaking in a frenzy … I was quite out of control, I went for the guy, I got so angry.18
Two days later, Bond went back to Michael Hunt to finish his assessment and, unwittingly, to complete a task designed to catch people feigning brain injury. Called the 15-Item Test, it is normally presented to the subject as being difficult and demanding, even though it’s actually extremely easy. The test consists of five groups of three letters or numbers, such as ABC, 123, abc, i ii iii, followed by a group of three shapes, which one has only ten seconds to memorise. Even people with serious brain damage are apparently capable of completing it with ease, yet Bond allegedly managed to recall just ten of the fifteen items, leading Hunt to wonder whether Alan was faking his amnesia or, as his affidavit put it, whether he might have ‘a desire to appear impaired in terms of his memory’.19
Hunt was not absolutely sure that Bond was putting it on, but he was convinced that brain damage was not his problem. There was no sign of injury on the brain scans and the pattern of his memory loss was not typical of brain-damage victims. Bond’s problem with memory, said Hunt, if indeed he had one, came from lack of concentration and attention.
Ramsay’s other expert witness, a neurologist called Dr Wally Knezevic, agreed with this diagnosis, emphasising that he could find no physical evidence of brain damage, and pointing out that he believed Bond’s cerebral function to be quite normal:
I performed the Mini Mental State Examination. He scored 30 out of 30. This is a screening test which did not detect any obvious abnormalities of registration, orientation, attention and calculation recall or language. Furthermore, throughout the interview and examination which lasted one and a half hours, he did not demonstrate any evidence of significant intellectual impairment. On more detailed testing with memory, language and comprehension, he did not demonstrate any significant abnormality.20
Knezevic then addressed the question of whether Bond was fit to testify and decided that he was. Finally, he had a swipe at Dr John Saunders, whose evidence he declared to be of no relevance since the doctor had no qualifications in this field.
On this basis, Bond’s chances of convincing the Federal Court to hold off his bankruptcy examination for a second time did not look good. But when the matter came to court in Sydney on 9 February 1994 there was a dramatic new development. Bond had been rushed into the Mounts Bay Clinic in Perth the previous day, suffering from a ‘severe major depression’, or as the Sydney Morning Herald put it, he had been struck down by ‘Skase syndrome’.21
The Federal Court now heard that Bond’s psychiatrist, Dr Dennis Tannenbaum, had informed Bond’s lawyers that Alan was ‘in obvious distress’.
He appears to have difficulty in recalling evenpeople he knows well … He feels that the future is hopeless. He feels that he has failed more than the average person … He feels that he is being punished and is disappointed in himself and tends to blame himself for everything that has happened … His irritation has extended into agitation and rage and he has lost his temper a number of times. He repeatedly feels he is unable to go on.22
A few days later, a second psychiatrist, Dr William Barclay, confirmed the diagnosis of major depression, suggesting thatitcould be accompanied by organic brain damage, and concluding that Alan would get agitated, stressed and possibly fly into an uncontrollable rage if he had to face cross-examination.
He has experienced public and private shame, humiliation, guilt and public harassment … he is overeating, he suffers persistent insomnia … he contemplates suicide and has considered a method of ending his life. He suffers physical symptoms of anxiety … he experiences a high degree of shame and guilt. He has a sense of hopelessness about the future.23
Barclay asked Bond whether the situation had got to the point where he had seriously thought of killing himself, to which Bond replied:
A:
Yes it has. I got as far as actually a couple of months ago going for a long swim off the beach. I thought I wouldn’t bother getting back.
Q:
What changed your mind?
A:
I was surprised I was still swimming. I kept going a long time. I started thinking about my grandchildren.24
Barclay had found Bond to be in a bad way during this interview. There were long silences, he had difficulty concentrating, and was frequently on the verge of tears. But if Alan had at last let life get on top of him it was hardly surprising, for even if he was found innocent of the fraud charges being brought against him, he would probably face a year in court to clear his name. And should he be found guilty, he had a long spell in jail to look forward to. On top of that, his empire had collapsed, his marriage had broken apart, and he was constantly pursued by police and press. He had gone from prince to pariah in the public’s mind.
Given all these pressures, it was perfectly understandable that he said he sometimes woke in the dead of night, cried easily, didn’t want to go out, felt tired, couldn’t concentrate, and had lost his enthusiasm for life. In fact, it would have been quite extraordinary if he had not felt like this.
But depression was not the issue. It was whether Bond was mentally capable of instructing his lawyers and of dealing with questions about whether Jurg Bollag had hidden $50 million for him in Jersey and Switzerland. And there was evidence that Bond was quite alert enough to do both things easily.
In the Mounts Bay Clinic, for example, while supposedly in the depths of despair, he cheered himself up by making phone calls in the middle of the night. Perhaps it was the wonder of Prozac, or possibly it was just insomnia, but in six days in hospital he managed to make seventy-nine phone calls, including a couple to Russia, which suggested strongly that he was still doing business in spite of his many afflictions.
And his improvement continued apace. Just two days after being released from hospital, Bond was seen enjoying himself at a Perth restaurant, and a few days after that he was photographed on the beach at Cottesloe with Diana Bliss, looking ‘a picture of health’. According to Woman’s Day journalist Ian Dougall, he outpaced Di as they swam 200 metres in the surf together, and then swam on while she rested. It was one of those wonderful pieces of writing that includes a paragraph written by lawyers to say that of course there has never been any suggestion that Mr Bond is anything but genuinely ill, yet opens with a sentence like this:
Alan Bond, who only weeks ago was hospitalised and described as a physical and mental wreck, unable to appear at a bankruptcy hearing, appears to have made a miraculous recovery.25
Despite this latest embarrassing revelation, Bond’s lawyers told the Federal Court they now had ‘clear’ new evidence of damage to Alan’s brain, the severity of which could not even be assessed until February 1995 (or roughly when Bond’s bankruptcy was due to finish). Meanwhile, they said, his major depression was so serious that he would be unable to take the stand even if the brain-damage argument were rejected.
As a consequence, Bond’s section 81 examination was again postponed, as was the question of his fitness to face court, which was set down for hearing in mid-April, when a phalanx of twenty-seven experts would line up to do battle.
The first skirmish came on 12 April, by which time Bond’s brain damage seemed to have worsened still further. His lawyers now alleged, via a new doctor, that his IQ had dropped by a massive sixty points—from genius level of 150 to near-dolt of ninety. This, said Alan’s QC, Tony Howard, had diminished his powers of memory, speech and conversation to such an extent that his doctors believed there was ‘a very real question’ as to whether he was capable of ‘going on at all’ in these proceedings.26
But before battle could be joined in earnest, Justice Sheppard fired his own warning shot at Bond’s army of experts. First of all, he told them he wanted to see Bond for himself; second, he warned that it would be the court (ie, him) and not the doctors who decided whether Bond was fit to testify; third, he had taken evidence from brain-damaged accident victims before and found them to be perfectly capable of answering questions; and fourth, he wished Bond’s lawyers would make up their minds whether brain damage or depression was the main reason for Bond’s supposed incapacity.
Then he lobbed in the grenade by warning Bond’s lawyers that he would not suppress any of the medical evidence that they put forward.
A week later, the battle was over before it had even begun. Bond’s adjutants came back to court to run up the white flag. Bond, they said, had now recovered from his depression and would answer all questions put to him. He would no longer argue he was too brain dead to appear, because he did not wish intimate details of his mental health to be revealed in public.
This sudden capitulation looked like total victory for Ramsay and common sense. But in fact it was no such thing, for the court had still not ruled whether Bond was fit to answer questions.
The last thing Ramsay wanted was for Bond to turn the interrogation into a farce by claiming that his memory had failed him, so he asked Justice Sheppard to declare that Bond was mentally capable of taking the stand.
Sheppard declined to give it. He also quit the battlefield, leaving his deputy to referee the contest as Ramsay and Bond shaped up for the most important fight of the bankruptcy. It is customary for judges to leave section 81 examinations to a registrar, but it was a shame that Sheppard chose this absolutely crucial moment to step aside, because his registrar would turn out to be nothing like as tough as he needed to be.