Alan said to Jim, ‘Give Luke some money’. Then Jim took $10,000 cash out of his pocket and gave it to me … Now this was ten o’clock in the morning and we were in a crowded restaurant.
Luke Atkins with Bond and Byrnes in 19941
In his double-breasted suit and striped business shirt, Luke Atkins looked prosperous, conservative and almost avuncular, much like an English merchant banker.
And when he first met Bond in October 1993 in Sydney’s Ritz Carlton Hotel he was a banker of sorts, in that he was the co-owner of a flashy new outfit called Asia Pacific, which had just put up its shingle in North Sydney, styling itself a boutique investment bank.
Asia Pacific’s shop front looked impressive enough, with deep carpets, antique furniture and expensive fittings, but it had only been in existence for a matter of months when Alan Bond walked through the door, and in a previous incarnation it had struggled to pay the rent and keep the phone connected.
Yet in 1994 it became the nerve centre for a whole series of bizarre business deals (in addition to St Bees) that Bond was trying to put together while still a bankrupt and supposedly too sick to concentrate on even the simplest business matter.
The story of these would-be deals is just like a B-movie script, with a bunch of crazy ideas and even crazier characters, and it may well be that none ever came to fruition. But the tale is worth telling because it paints a picture of the people that Bond was doing business with and the rainbows he was chasing. There were gold and diamond mines that others had long ago abandoned, secret shipments of osmium-187 which is used in missiles, letters of credit from obscure banks in Panama, cargoes of tinned tomatoes to Odessa and even a proposal to buy US$25 billion worth of Russian roubles. And Bond apparently was excited by all of them. Indeed, as Neil Cunningham, one of his backers on St Bees, puts it, ‘The weirder it was, the more he liked it’.2
It must be said that Bond was forced onto the fringes because most respectable banks and businesspeople refused to deal with him—he was, after all, still a bankrupt and still facing criminal charges for fraud, and the memory of him losing billions of dollars of other people’s money was still fresh in the mind. But even so, he could hardly have chosen a less auspicious bunch of people to do business with.
There’s a type of businessperson known as a fax jockey, because they fire off endless faxes offering incredible deals on Vietnamese cement, Russian steel or EU sugar to anyone with more money than sense, and Bond was like a magnet to them all. They had heard he had hidden millions of dollars in Switzerland and had figured he would not complain to the police if he lost it.
Luke Atkins therefore found hundreds of ‘unrepeatable’ offers spewing out of the fax machine at Asia Pacific for the attention of Alan and his chums.
One of Bond’s mates would ring and say, ‘I’ve just talked to this man and this fellow’s big. His brother-in-law’s the second-in-command to the man who polishes the shoes for General Wiranto in Indonesia, and what we’re going to do is market shoe polish in Indonesia. And this fellow Bill is going to ring you at ten o’clock tonight and tell you where to send the fax’. And I’m thinking, ‘I’ve gotta do my washing, I’ve gotta do my ironing, I’ve gotta go down to Woolies and I’ve gotta have two business plans ready by Friday and it’s Wednesday night and the bloody fax roll’s out’. I tell you, we used to replace fax rolls like they were going out of style.3
Helping Alan to marshal this avalanche of crazy and not-so-crazy opportunities was one of his old mates from Perth called Roger Bryer, a small-time entrepreneur who made his money finding deals for the big boys. In the past, Bryer had worked with Peter Briggs, a gold-mine promoter in Perth who had done time in jail for tax fraud in the late 1980s, but he had also acquired a sort of record for himself by leaving a remarkable trail of corporate wreckage in his wake. In 1994 he was listed by the Australian Securities Commission (ASC) as a director or ex-director of fifty-three different companies, of which no fewer than forty-six had been struck off or were on their way to the corporate graveyard.4
Like Bond, Bryer had a salesman’s charm, which was no doubt how he kept recovering from such setbacks. And, like Bond, he had arranged his affairs so that he could survive almost any disaster. While his wife reportedly drove a Rolls-Royce and lived in a fancy house, Roger apparently had no assets to his name. His sole possessions appeared to be two mobile telephones that he kept constantly at his side, while his diet seemed to consist exclusively of cigarettes. As to where he came from and how old he was, it was hard to be sure. The ASC’s records showed that Roger Maurice Bryer of Burke Drive, Attadale had been born in Perth on 23 June 1942, or in Melbourne on the same date, or in Liberec, Czechoslovakia, on 27 January 1947, depending on which version of his life you wanted to believe.
Bryer represented himself to Atkins as the Australian arm of a company called Tri Kal International, which hailed from the mining boom town of Calgary in Canada and claimed to be a big international development company. Tri Kal was almost as much of a mystery as Bryer, for it was behind with the rent on its modest-sounding fourth-floor office suite, and its landlord kept faxing Atkins in Sydney for $70,000 he was owed, even though Atkins had no connection with the company.
The Calgary telephone directory showed no trace of the company in either the business listings or the Yellow Pages, and none of the Canadian stock exchanges had ever heard of it. Nor did the name Tri Kal ring a bell with reporters on Calgary’s local paper.
On closer examination, the company turned out to have its registered office in the Isle of Man, a tax haven in the Irish Sea, which was also home to the Bond/Bollag company Metal Traders. This was also a sign that Tri Kal might not be quite as substantial as it purported to be.5
Tri Kal’s shareholders, according to Luke Atkins, or the people who would share the spoils (if any of its deals came off), were Alan Bond, Roger Bryer, Jim Byrnes and a Canadian accountant and ex-professional ice hockey player called Gerry Sklar, famously described by one of Bond’s business partners as ‘an eskimo in cowboy boots’.
Asked how he can be sure that Bond had a share in Tri Kal’s deals (which Sklar and Bond denied vigorously when documents were seized from Bond’s home in 1994 by the Australian Federal Police (AFP)), Atkins says:
They stated it, they wrote it, they sent a number of cards, they set it out on the whiteboard, with Bond saying who would look after his share … and that was always clear to me from day one.6
Bond, however, had every reason to deny it, because the law forbade him from doing business while still a bankrupt.
In late 1993, Atkins was sent to the USA and Europe to assess a range of projects for Tri Kal which included a development in Denver, an investment banking operation in Texas and a casino in Las Vegas. His mission was to report on whether any of these Tri Kal deals was worth pursuing and to advise on whether they could be financed. But it seems to have been a bizarre experience. In Houston he was welcomed into a beautiful office full of flowers and expensive furniture, only to return the next day to discover that it was completely empty. In New York and Rome he dined in magnificent restaurants with Italians who ran cleaning businesses and carried guns. And in Zurich he sat for three days in a hotel room waiting for a phone call that never came.
The meetings were set up by Bryer and Sklar, but Bond told him what to say when he got there.
Alan came to the office and said, ‘Okay, we’re going to do this, this, this and this, and we will pay the accommodation and airfares’. And ‘this’ was everything from a waste-disposal tender in Mexico to building low-cost housing in Texas.7
Bond, it seems, always called all the shots.
He would decide on what, when, where, why, and what deals he liked and didn’t like. He would write on a whiteboard or on pieces of paper, ‘No, I don’t want to do it that way, I want to do it this way, this way, this way. This is the best way to do it. This is the way to present it to people’.8
As far as Atkins knows, none of the deals that he discussed on the trip (or at any other time) ever came to anything because Bond and Tri Kal never came up with the millions of dollars that were needed to make them work. Tri Kal was always relying on others to produce finance, and for some reason it never eventuated. It was a very frustrating time.
On a smaller scale, however, Tri Kal had plenty of money, which paid for business-class airfares and five-star hotels all over the world. And so did Bond, despite the fact that he was supposed to be penniless. Atkins recalls being taken to lunch one day by Alan at a restaurant opposite Asia Pacific’s offices in North Sydney:
We walked across the road and everyone stopped and stared. Then we sat down and people came across and said, ‘You’re my hero, Bondy’ and all that. We had lunch and at the end he pulled out of his pocket a huge roll of bank notes and pulled off fifty-dollar notes to pay for lunch. He then put the roll back in his pocket and we toddled off. You know, ‘We’ve all been working hard and deserve a break’. As a charismatic character you can’t beat him, he’s unbelievable.9
On another occasion, when Luke complained to Bond that none of Tri Kal’s deals was coming off and that he hadn’t been paid for any of the work he had done, more cash materialised.
He just said, ‘Ha-ha, well come down to breakfast and meet someone’. So we went down to Bondi, and Jim Byrnes turned up and parked his Bentley out the front, and we had breakfast. And Alan said to Jim, ‘Give Luke some money’. Then Jim took $10,000 cash out of his pocket and gave it to me. And Alan said, ‘Look, that’s a loan to keep you guys on your feet. Now pay for breakfast’. Now this was ten o’clock in the morning and we were in a crowded restaurant full of people and Jim gets a roll of notes out of his pocket and just counts out $10,000. Then Alan and Jim went over to Jim’s car and drove off.10
Many of the deals that attracted Bond’s interest around this time were in the Eastern bloc, where the breakup of the Soviet Union had left genuine opportunities to make a killing. Here, Bond and Tri Kal found themselves dealing with a colourful Ukrainian called Vladimir D’Jamirze, a dashing young man with a ponytail and pencil-thin moustache who looked like a Cossack.
It was Vladimir D’Jamirze, in fact, whom Bond was so busy telephoning from his room at the Sheraton Wentworth in Sydney in May 1994 when he was supposedly too ill to undergo examination in the Federal Court. Vladimir had been staying at the Airport Hilton in Zurich, trying to set up a number of deals involving millions or even billions of dollars, and Bond had been in constant contact by fax and phone, even though he claimed to be too sick to remain in the witness box.11
Prince Vladimir D’Jamirze, as his business card described him, lived with his elder brother Victor in a vast cluster of redbrick houses in Sydney’s western suburbs, along with five other brothers and assorted sisters, wives and offspring. Their Kennedy-style compound was protected by high security gates and crowned by a huge satellite dish, which distinguished it somewhat from the neighbouring fibro cottages, but the D’Jamirzes would have stood out in any environment, for they were hardly a run-of-the-mill family. They claimed, for example, to have presented a jewel-encrusted icon of the Madonna, worth $5 million, to the Patriarch of the Orthodox Church in Moscow to celebrate 1,000 years of Christianity in Russia, and to be on first-name terms with several high-up ministers in several former Soviet republics.
The D’Jamirzes described themselves as business brokers who could smooth the path of those who wanted to trade with Russia, and they had obviously made a decent living at this over the years, but in 1994 their record did not inspire confidence. One of their companies, Curly International, had planned to fly Russia’s version of the space shuttle out to Australia, piggybacked on a huge Soviet cargo plane. A second company, Antonov Airlines, had tried to run cargo between the USSR and Australia in a private partnership with the Soviet Defence Ministry. But both had gone down in flames.
In fact, at the height of their dealings with Bond, five of the D’Jamirzes’ eight companies had crashed to earth and Victor and Vladimir were on the verge of being made bankrupt. In February 1995, they were also banned from being directors, promoters or managers of any Australian company for three years because they had ‘demonstrated their incompetence and lack of understanding of the duties of a director’.12
The deals that the two brothers were attempting with Alan Bond appeared to be even more ambitious than the ones that had got them into strife. The most modest involved buying a valuable collection of Russian violins for US$7.5 million; the next was a promise to procure US$2 billion worth of diamonds, gold and osmium-187 from the Ukraine; and the third and best plotted the exchange of 3 trillion Russian roubles for US$25 billion. One has to say that when projects like these come off, the architects are acclaimed as geniuses. Sadly, the D’Jamirzes did not appear to fit into this category.
When I met Vladimir in 1999 in a café in Parramatta he certainly did not look like a billion-dollar businessman. He was dressed in jeans and a red T-shirt, and was wearing leather sandals. His trademark ponytail was still in place but his hair had turned grey. A tiny mobile phone rang constantly at his side, and every few minutes he broke off our conversation to answer it, reassuring callers that their various deals would work out.
I suggested that most of the projects he had attempted with Bond looked crazy, and he smiled a gentle, charming smile. ‘These are the ones that make big money,’ he said. ‘If one of these deals had come off we would have made a profit of US$4 billion.’ But judging by his account of the task involved, it would have been a miracle if any of them had succeeded.
In mid-1994, according to Vladimir, he and Bond attempted to buy and sell vast quantities of a radioactive isotope called osmium-187, which is used to make stealth bombers and missiles undetectable to radar. This precious substance was then worth around $200,000 a gram, according to Vladimir, yet he claims he was able to buy it from his Ukrainian contacts for a third of the price.13 The snag, however, was that it was almost impossible to find a buyer, for osmium-187 is a strategically important material that can only be sold legally to a small club of ‘friendly’ countries like the UK, the USA and Japan, and then only to buyers with a valid end-user certificate.
This little problem had not deterred this odd couple from having a shot at the US$4 billion jackpot, and in 1994 Vladimir laid out US$3 million of his family’s money to kickstart the deal. This was enough, he says, to grease a few palms in the Ukraine and secure a five-gram sample of the stuff, which was then delivered to a bonded warehouse in Germany for inspection by buyers. Bond, meanwhile, apparently claimed to have a customer and, according to D’Jamirze, produced a piece of paper that looked like a valid end-user certificate.
Vladimir says that he and Bond spent several months trying to stitch the osmium-187 deal together, and that he and Roger Bryer based themselves in Zurich for several weeks in mid-1994, trying to make this and other deals happen.14 Bond, however, was no arms dealer. Nor did he have access to the US$2 billion which was needed to buy the ten kilograms that was on offer, so the deal fell apart and Vladimir lost his US$3 million.
According to Vladimir, the rouble deal also ended in disappointment—he smiled coyly when asked about the violins— but Alan produced enough ready cash to indicate that he might have access to several million dollars offshore.
Private documents seized by the AFP in raids in September 1994 suggest the same thing. They show that Bond instructed Roger Bryer to set up three British Virgin Islands companies to handle the D’Jamirze transactions, and to open Swiss bank accounts for each of them at the Banque Indosuez in Zurich.15 Various sums of money then bounced in and out of these (and other) Swiss bank accounts in lumps as large as $2 million.
In May 1994, for example, when Bond was supposedly too sick to answer questions about Dallhold in the Federal Court, he was faxing Vladimir from his Sydney hotel room to say that US$1.24 million had been transferred to a Swiss account in the name of a company called Shannon Worldwide. Soon afterwards, he was signing a contract guaranteeing to pay Vladimir and Victor D’Jamirze US$3 million ‘before the close of banking hours in Zurich’ on 25 May 1994.16
Further documents seized by the AFP from Bond’s house in Cottesloe show $1.7 million moving from the Banque Indosuez in Lausanne to the Swiss Bank Corporation in Zurich in mid-1994, apparently in connection with one of the D’Jamirze deals. Significantly, this money had started out from a bank account in the name of a company called SIDRO Anstalt at the Private Trust Bank in Vaduz, Liechtenstein, suggesting that this could be the latest hiding place for some of Bond’s offshore millions, last sighted leaving Jersey en masse in the late 1980s.
Liechtenstein, which is one of the world’s most secret tax havens, sits in a small, steep valley between Switzerland and Austria, less than two hours from Jurg Bollag’s home town of Zug. Its 30,000 citizens are still ruled by a prince, yet it is hardly the land of fairy-tale castles that its romantic Ruritanian image conjures up. Its capital, Vaduz, is a drab little town at the end of a bus route, whose heart is dominated by a large concrete car park and an even larger concrete bus station.
Tracing money here is a nightmare because Liechtenstein laws do not require the banks to know whose fortunes they are holding, and Liechtenstein’s corporate records give no clues to the ownership or wealth of the thousands of companies that use the principality as a bolthole. When I examined SIDRO’s file in May 1999, all that I could glean was that the company had been set up in April 1987 to own and administer assets outside Liechtenstein. Its registered office was a law firm in Vaduz’s main street, rejoicing under the name of Dr Dr Batliner & Partners [sic], where two lawyers acted as the company’s directors.
But there is a mass of evidence to link SIDRO and its millions to Alan Bond. Indeed, a trusted friend of Alan’s, the late Tony Weatherald, was adamant that by the early 1990s it had become Bond’s offshore money box. In 1996 he was asked about the company by Jamie Fawcett, a freelance journalist and investigator.
Q:
Have you ever heard the name SIDRO Anstalt?
A:
Yes.
Q:
In relation to what?
A:
To matters pertaining to Alan’s private trusts and also set up by George Bollag.17
Tony Weatherald was a business battler who was hired to work for Bond in late 1992 but had known him for almost twenty years. According to Luke Atkins and others, he was constantly at Bond’s side during his bankruptcy.
Tony was a cross between a courier or bag man and a long-term confidant of Bond … He never contributed to the substance or structure of any discussion … He’d toddle about with documents and cash, here and there, here and there, here and there.18
Weatherald acted as a go-between for Bond and Bollag. He told Fawcett that he had ferried some documents to London for Alan in 1993. These related to a diamond mine in Colorado, into which Bollag had poured a lot of Bond’s money, and the sale of some shares in a major US company. All had been signed by Bond so that Bollag could use SIDRO to complete the transactions on Bond’s behalf.19
A Perth geologist called Greg Barnes has also linked SIDRO to Bond. In February 1993, the day before Alan went into hospital for open-heart surgery, Bond allegedly offered to buy Barnes’s consulting business and some Austrian gold-mining leases, using SIDRO as the purchaser. Barnes was asked on oath by one of Ramsay’s partners in January 1995 how the Liechtenstein company had been brought into the picture.
A:
Well … it was Bond and Kitarski [then working with Bond] deciding they were going to use SIDRO … They sat opposite me and they said, ‘Which company shall we use for this?’ They went through a whole list of companies, most of which are names I’ve forgotten, and decided that SIDRO was the one to use …
Q:
And you’ve no idea how they would be aware of SIDRO?
A:
I just assumed they owned it.20
Barnes was almost certainly right. Documents seized by the Australian Federal Police include a fax from Jurg Bollag to Alan Bond on 18 February 1993, asking Alan and Tony Weatherald to agree the wording of a letter that Bollag would send to Barnes on SIDRO’s behalf.21
Greg Barnes met Bond twenty or thirty times in the space of eighteen months and even went to Austria with one of Alan’s more disreputable buddies, Whaka Kele, to pursue a gold-mining deal into which a number of Perth investors had been persuaded to sink money.22 Kele told anyone who would listen that he was a Maori chief with a degree from Oxford University, but his real claim to fame was that he was a prize con man who relieved Bond and others of many thousands of dollars. For a time, however, he was one of Bond’s closest mates and talked to him on a daily basis.23
In June 1994, he and Barnes travelled to Salzburg and stayed at the Kaiserhof Hotel, leaving a huge unpaid bill which showed that Kele had phoned Bond constantly while he was in hospital in Perth. This was shortly after Alan had collapsed in court, claiming to be too sick to face the Manet fraud charges. According to Barnes, Kele spent the rest of the time shooting his mouth off to the hotel manager about how he was looking after Alan Bond’s billions for him:
Q:
Just on Whaka Kele, you said that he’s spouting off to everyone about his control of Bond’s millions.
A:
Billions. Get the words right.
Q:
Okay. Did he elaborate at all on where …
A:
I was sitting in a room at one stage and he was talking to the hotel manager, of all people, and he was quoting names of companies where it was.
Q:
What about locations …
A:
Oh it was Liechtenstein and Switzerland and the Channel Islands and Bermuda. I don’t know. I wasn’t paying all that much interest. I was, to be quite sure, bloody embarrassed, because if Bond did have billions away, he didn’t want this fool shouting it to somebody he’d never met before.24
Of course it was a ridiculous notion that Bond had billions of dollars hidden away, and Kele was certainly not a man whose word could be trusted. Given Bond’s difficulty in coming up with money for any of the deals he was involved in, there must also be some question whether he even had millions of dollars to play with, or whether his and Kele’s boasts were simply hot air. But despite the fact that the Tri Kal and D’Jamirze deals fell over for lack of money, Luke Atkins for one is still convinced that Bond had plenty of cash tucked away and believes he simply preferred to let other people risk theirs.
I’m convinced from documents that I’ve seen that Bond has money, from people that I’ve been to see, from trips to Switzerland and New York and people that I’ve met with. There’s no doubt in my mind that there is Bond-labelled money stashed away in Europe.25
Neil Cunningham, who lost nigh on $1 million of his own money over St Bees, says he never saw Bond put any of his cash at risk, but he also believes that Alan simply liked it that way. Bond’s whole business career, after all, had been built on borrowing other people’s money and not on gambling with his own. Cunningham is also sure that Alan had a hidden fortune because, in his words, ‘Bond never got excited over anything less than $20 million’.26