The buccaneering tycoon scored one of Australian sport’s most spectacular successes before being jailed for a billion-dollar fraud

On 19 January 1974, a pack of journalists and dignitaries descended upon a new marina an hour north of Perth to watch property developer and business collector Alan Bond launch his first America’s Cup attempt. The upstart Australian, who became a millionaire in his 20s by trading property for credit, had a knack for starting new suburbs, and this was to be his crowning achievement.

Yanchep Sun City, a luxury lifestyle city of 200,000 people, would be Perth’s sophisticated neighbour. And the greatest drawcard: it would host the 1977 America’s Cup, after Bond’s 12-metre yacht, Southern Cross, lived up to his frequent boast that it was the fastest boat in the world and won the challenge.

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Bond made no secret of his ulterior motive for entering the race, as if it were a perfectly ordinary thing to spend millions on an unwinnable international yacht race in order to shift a few blocks north of Perth. Investigative journalist Paul Barry, who spent years chronicling the West Australian tycoon, described in his biography, The Rise and Fall of Alan Bond, the response received by a churlish reporter who suggested Bond should enter the race just for the sake of the sport.

“Anyone who considers racing for the America’s Cup isn’t a business proposition is a bloody fool,” Bond replied. “There can be no other justification for spending $6m on the Australian challenge unless the return is going to involve something more than just an ornate silver pitcher.”

The scene was quintessentially Alan Bond: ambitious, audacious and risky; and blunt and perhaps a little over-candid. Such behaviour coloured his life for much of its 77 years, most in the public eye, until his death on 5 June 2015.

Alan Bond on Australia II on 14 January 1986 in Perth, Australia. Photograph: Tony Feder/Getty Images

Yanchep certainly needed a boost. The subdivision had been farmland before Bond snapped it up (and, according to Barry, painted the sandhills green to make them look more attractive in the brochure) but sales had fallen away in the previous two years. Perth’s property market had deflated and with the value of Bond Corporation, which had increased its revenue 12-fold and it’s borrowings 20-fold in the three years between 1971 and 1974 only to close out the financial year $100m in debt. The ill-timed discovery that the Southern Cross was not, as it turns out, all that fast, could have ruined Bond. But ruin was still 20 years away.

Bond was born in London on 22 April 1938. He immigrated to Australia with his parents, Frank and Kathleen, and elder sister, Geraldine, after a childhood split between Perivale and his father’s family home in the Welsh coal mining town of Cwmtillery, and arrived in Fremantle, Western Australia, on 8 February 1950.

He left school at 14 and undertook a signwriting apprenticeship, which he abandoned three years later to start his own competitor signwriting business with his father. In 1959 he founded the company that became the Bond Corporation and in 1960 he made his first land deal, a five acre block in the Perth hills he bought for £13,000. He borrowed the full amount and had already bought two more lots by the time the first subdivision was sold and paid off three months later.

Bond was a skilled salesman with a knack for coming up with cash. He never worried about whether he’d get credit. His early business partner, Cam McNab, told Barry that Bond would often buy something they could refinance on the occasions that they couldn’t pay their wages bill. Bond did not bother to secure a loan before bidding on the building at 68 St Georges Terrace, which became Bond HQ, waiting until the gavel had struck to ask McNab to nip down to the bank and secure the 10% deposit they needed to put down before the hour was up.

The high-risk strategy infuriated many who dealt with him, not least because it seemed to work. In a 2008 article discussing Bond’s return to the Business Review Weekly rich list world, Barry quoted Michael Smith, a business associate at Lesotho Diamonds during Bond’s self-imposed exile in London during the 2000s.

Alan Bond in 1994. Bond’s high-risk business strategy’s infuriated many, not least because they seemed to work. Photograph: Daily Mail/REX_Shutterstock

“He’s amazingly persuasive,” Smith said. “You have to pinch yourself. You go into his office wanting to kill him and you come out thinking that maybe he’s right after all.”

Bond married redheaded Eileen Hughes at St Patrick’s Church in Fremantle in 1955. Hughes was from one of Perth’s most prominent Catholic families – her cousin is car dealer John Hughes – and Bond converted from protestantism to walk his pregnant bride up the aisle. The couple, who were just 17 when they wed, would go on to have four children: John, Craig, Suzanne and Jody.

Suzanne, an international showjumper, died in 2000. Eldest son John is a respected figure on Perth’s St George’s Terrace and founding director of multi-billion property developer Primewest, but his reputation, according to Clarion Award winning business reporter Neale Prior, is the complete opposite of his father’s. “He has an impeccable reputation around town,” Prior told Perth’s 6PR radio station on Thursday.

In contrast Bond senior, Prior said, had a reputation for doing “everything on the edge”.

“He was punting 5 cents of his own money and 95 cents of someone else’s,” he said.

“This man was huge. And the problem was, he just then proceeded to do bigger and bigger and stupider and stupider deals, and brought his life undone.”

Bond made two more attempts at the America’s Cup before his historic 1983 win. Australia II, so secret that it was kept literally under wraps to evade prying American eyes, was the first boat from outside the New York Yacht Club to take the title in its 132-year history. The race was run just before dawn Western Australian time, and sunrise saw Australia’s prime minister of six months, Bob Hawke, toasting the win among the streamers at Bond’s Cottesloe home and declaring to the nation that, “any boss who sacks anyone for not turning up today is a bum”.

Alan Bond with Australia’s then prime minister Bob Hawke at a reception to congratulate the crew of Australia II in Canberra, in 1983. Photograph: National Archives Of Australia

The win made Bond a national hero and he was appointed as an officer of the Order of Australia the following year. He had already been named Australian of the Year, sharing the title with land rights activist Galarrwuy Yunupingu in 1978.

By the time Perth finally got its America’s Cup in 1987 (at Fremantle, not Yanchep, the latter having been bought by Japan’s Tokyu Corporation in 1977) Bond had shocked New York society again by buying Vincent van Gogh’s Irises for US$53.9m at auction at Sotherby’s. It was purchased on borrowed money, at least half of which had been borrowed from Sotherbys’ themselves, much to the chagrin of the art world. After a brief tour around Australia the painting was returned to the auction house and according to the New York Times held at an undisclosed location until Bond could stump up the cash. In 1990 it was sold to the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

Bond expanded his remit rapidly in the 1980s. In 1987 he founded Bond University in Queensland. That same year he made the infamous $1bn bid for Kerry Packer’s Nine Network, which Packer bought back for a mere $250m when Bond’s empire began to sink two years later. Packer used the proceeds to buy a 25% stake in pay TV company Foxtel and build the polo fields at his Hunter Valley property. After striking the deal, the late media mogul quipped: “You only get one Alan Bond in your lifetime, and I’ve had mine.”

By the late 1980s, tales of lost public funds in the WA Inc scandal under Labor premier Brian Burke were front page news. The Bond Corporation was one of several linked to deals with the government, which saw more than $600m in public money lost between 1983 and 1987. The scandal prompted a royal commission in 1990.

Talking about his 80s heyday to Andrew Denton on ABC’s Enough Rope in 2003 Bond said: “In the 1980s, there was a sense in the business community that you could stretch the envelope.

Anyone who considers racing for the America’s Cup isn’t a business proposition is a bloody foolAlan Bond

“If you were doing an acquisition or you wanted some planning permission, then the lawyers would work on the principle of ‘How do we get round the laws as they are today?’ And they would advise you,” he said. “They wouldn’t say, ‘Look, you can’t do it that way.’

“So I think the laws were stretched, no question about that.”

The world began to catch up with Bond in 1992. He was declared bankrupt, with a personal debt of $1.8bn. His wife, known around town as Big Red, left him after 37 years of marriage and a number of high profile infidelities on his part, including a 10-year affair with theatre producer Diana Bliss. Bond spent two months in jail for a fraud offence conviction connected to a 1988 bank bailout.

He was released for re-trial and returned before the court on a new set of fraud charges in 1994, over the sale of a painting by Edouard Manet, but was declared unfit to stand trial because of complications resulting from his 1993 heart surgery which, Barry notes, had the curious effect of wiping his memory.

Soon after that his family was allowed to buy out his bankruptcy for $12m, paying about half a cent for every dollar owed to shareholders. Bond was no longer in debt but hundreds who had held shares in his company were.

In 1995 he married Bliss, and in 1997 he was convicted of fraud and sentenced to four years jail for syphoning $1.2bn from Bell Resources to shore up the cash reserves of the failed Bond Corporation, a scheme the crown prosecutor in the trial described as “enormous in its magnitude, audacious in its execution and redolent of the most serious dishonesty.”

The sentence was increased to seven years on appeal but abruptly cut short by the high court, which ruled that the Commonwealth Office of the Director of Public Appeal could not appeal a sentence that had been brought and passed by state.

You only get one Alan Bond in your lifetime, and I’ve had mineKerry Packer

It wasn’t punishment enough for Tim Phillips, a former ASIC investigator who handled the investigation into Bond’s misconduct. Phillips told ABC’s 7.30 Report in 2000 that he was disappointed the sentence had been downgraded, remarking, “Mr Bond certainly has been fairly lucky, in my view, in terms of his connection to the law.”

Barry also criticised the high court’s decision, calculating that Bond’s 1,298 days in prison equated to roughly one day in jail for every million he defrauded. In contrast, 22-year-old Aboriginal man Jamie Wurramara, in the Northern Territory, was given a mandatory penalty of a year’s jail for stealing $23 worth of cordial and biscuits.

“Had the same formula applied to Bond,” journalist Mark Head notes, “he would have been imprisoned for 50 million years.”

Bond was released almost immediately following the high court decision and was banned by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission from being the director or manager of an Australian company for five years.

He responded to the ban by moving to London, where he invested in diamond mining and oil in Africa and reappeared on the Business Review Weekly rich list in 2008. But then the global financial crisis wiped out the value of those companies. In recent years the 77-year-old appeared to be plotting a comeback to the Australian business scene, listing himself as the director of two companies - Strategic Asset Investments and Capital Asset Enterprises – which he registered with Asic.

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Bond split his time between Perth and London with wife Bliss, until she committed suicide in 2012, and remained close with his ex-wife, who also lived in London. Eileen rushed back to Perth after his heart surgery for a last few moments before he died. At a press conference announcing his death, John Bond described his parents as “soulmates”.

“To a lot of people dad was a larger than life character who started with nothing and experienced so much,” John said. “To us he was just dad.”

John Hughes was incorrectly described as Eileen Bond’s brother. He is actually her cousin. This was corrected on 13 June 2015.

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