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Peter Foster: Australia’s Dumbest Conman

The great news photograph for 2006 was of the handcuffed, pudgy Australian conman Peter Foster dressed only in his underpants with a bandage on his head, after he jumped into the river in Suva, Fiji, to avoid apprehension. Foster had been on the run for weeks when police finally caught up with him. Officers commandeered a fisherman’s boat and Foster was struck on the forehead by the boat’s propeller.

More used to a Mercedes than a police paddy wagon, Foster was carted off to hospital in his undies. When Foster recovered from his miniscule head wounds he faced charges for immigration violations, mortgage fraud and corporate sabotage. But what was new? It was just another chapter in the corrupt life of Australia’s dumbest conman.

At 14, while all of the other kids at his school in Surfer’s Paradise were doing homework, Peter Foster was leasing pinball machines and promoting theme nights at the local disco. At 17 he promoted an elimination world title fight on the Gold Coast between Australia’s Tony Mundine, father of Anthony ‘the Man’ Mundine, and the British light heavyweight champion Bunny Johnson. Mundine won on a TKO in the tenth and everyone made a lot of money. The young promoter Penthouse magazine christened Kid Tycoon was on his way.

When 21-year-old Foster was staying at Muhammad Ali and his wife Veronica’s Los Angeles home while making a documentary on Ali, Veronica showed Foster a packet of Bai Lin tea and told him of its wonderful slimming powers. What Mrs Ali, with her hourglass figure, must have omitted to say was that to make it work you just drank Bai Lin tea and didn’t eat. But why bother with such trivialities? Foster purchased the Australian rights and using Mrs Ali’s endorsement watched it take off. Next he purchased the Bai Lin distribution rights for England, South Africa and Europe, moved to England, and smooth-talked some very suspect high-profile celebrities into endorsing it.

Fergie, ‘the Duchess of Pork’, at that time the Queen’s daughter-in-law, gave up eating altogether, drank only Bai Lin, and the weight fell off. ‘It’s amazing,’ she said. As did one of the world’s skinniest men, champion jockey Lester Piggott, who was notorious for endorsing anything if there was a quid in it. I would love to have seen 51-kilo Lester saying ‘Drink Bai Lin tea and be like me’ in his falsetto voice. Foster also had a highly publicised affair with the model Samantha Fox, whom he had employed to promote his tea. Business boomed.

But when government testing proved that Bai Lin was just ordinary black China tea with no more slimming powers than Twinings or Bushells, Foster’s empire crumbled. Samantha Fox and the Bentleys had long gone and in 1994 Foster was fined £21,000 for a trading standards offence over Bai Lin tea, and in 1996 he was jailed for breaching laws regarding his distribution of slimming granules. Nine months later he absconded while on day release from open prison and went to Australia, where he was subsequently re-arrested and extradited back to England to finish his sentence.

Out of jail, Foster promoted a similar product, Chow Low tea, in the United States where they take grave umbrage to shonky promoters with fake products and toss them in the slammer until they get the message. After running ads in newspapers across the US that claimed that the tea lowered cholesterol levels, Foster was convicted of a trading standards offence and jailed for four months.

In September 2000 he was jailed in England for using fraudulent documents to obtain credit for a company that sold thigh-reduction cream. Upon release he returned to Australia, where he became a worldwide marketer of fake lotions and potions, pills and patches and spray-on hair, sold as health and beauty products.

With Foster back in England in 2002, the Prime Minister’s wife, Cherie Blair, unwittingly made the mistake of asking her ‘lifestyle guru’, Carole Caplin, who was in a relationship with Foster (she had been told Foster was a genius on such matters), if he would help her out with some real estate advice. Foster secured a better deal on two properties in Bristol for Cherie Blair, and momentarily the ex-jailbird and international conman and the Blairs became friends.

Foster was even invited to No. 10 for dinner on the night of his 40th birthday. When the Prime Minister’s advisers informed him of his wife’s new best friend’s track record, they couldn’t distance themselves quick enough, but the incident achieved headlines worldwide.

To repay the Blairs’ kindnesses and his pregnant girlfriend Carole Caplin’s love for him, Foster later claimed that he believed his partner was pregnant with Tony Blair’s child (which she lost prematurely), the product of a longstanding extramarital affair. It was proved to be an elaborate hoax and Carole Caplin said: ‘This is just a new way for Peter to get attention. He is just a fantasist and these absurd stories shouldn’t be given any credibility.’

In 2002, Peter Foster was living in Ireland and selling alleged slimming pill Trimit franchises for €200,000. Foster was deported from Ireland to Australia in 2003 because of a two-year prison sentence for fraud imposed in 1996 in Britain. Back in Australia in 2004, Foster, ever in search of publicity, foolishly appeared on Andrew Denton’s TV show Enough Rope and was literally eaten alive by the clever interviewer as he tried to pass himself off as a likable scoundrel. Instead, Denton showed him up to be the liar and fool that he really was. Fool, that is, for having anything to do with the considerably smarter Denton in the first place.

And so, he turned up in trouble yet again in 2006, this time in Fiji in his undies, where he was interviewed about presenting a falsified police clearance certificate to immigration authorities in Fiji to obtain a work permit, obtaining loans from the Federated States of Micronesia using lease documents and impersonating a rival developer to discredit a resort development by telling the press that it was going to be a nude hideaway for gay men.

Foster pleaded not guilty on three charges: forgery, uttering forged documents and obtaining a work permit on forged documents, and was released on bail the following day. On 10 January 2007, Fiji Television reported that Foster had disappeared.

On 14 January, Foster was arrested in nearby Vanuatu and was charged with illegal entry into the country on a yacht without a valid visa. On 2 February 2007, Foster was sentenced to six weeks’ imprisonment and fined $A1400. He was released after three weeks and deported to Australia, where police were waiting at the airport for him. In 2007 Foster pleaded guilty to forging documents related to $300,000 that he obtained fraudulently from the National Bank of the Federated States of Micronesia. After serving 18 months of a four-and-a-half-year sentence, he was released on parole at the start of May 2009.

Although he denies being a ‘conman’ and now prefers to be known as ‘an international man of mischief’ – try explaining that to all of the people who bought franchises in his shonky companies – over the years Foster has been charged with false advertising, conspiracy to supply under a false trade description, operating a company as an undischarged bankrupt, travelling on a false passport, assaulting police, resisting arrest, absconding while on bail, failure to appear in relation to charges on counts of deception, failure to appear at extradition proceedings and uttering false documents, and has been jailed in three countries for fraud-related matters.

Apparently, his latest venture is a book of his life. That’s a case of seeing is believing. For openers, it’s hard work writing a book, and he doesn’t like work, and it’s doubtful there would be a word of truth in it. Besides, who’s interested in his rotten life of robbing and conning people?

And it’s doubtful that any publishers will be offering him a cash advance.