Aussie tycoon hailed as hero for winning the America’s Cup
Alan Bond, 77, who died in Perth after heart surgery on June 5, lived on his wits and other people’s money, and became the greatest entrepreneur of his day in Australia.
At his peak he was a national hero, applauded by the Australian prime minister, and fawned upon by the government of Western Australia. When his yacht, Australia II, brought home the America’s Cup in 1983, 200,000 people lined the streets of Perth.
Overcome, Bob Hawke, the prime minister, declared on television: “Any employer who sacks a worker for not coming in today is a bum!”
Eight years later, Bond, fighting off bankruptcy, was chased through the streets by a process server. Jail was to follow. He lived from deal to deal, faked the figures, and personified a whole era of corporate excess.
He was born on April 22, 1938, in the west London suburb of Perivale, the younger of two children. He was 11 when the family migrated to Fremantle, Western Australia.
At 22, he found the key to the future: his first property deal, on almost $20,000 of borrowed money.
To finance real estate, he juggled his paint business. When he ran into trouble, he would buy more land, have it revalued, and borrow against the new valuation.
The tricks he learned early on were eventually to be repeated on an enormous scale across the world.
At 29, he was a millionaire. He took up sailing, and told the world he had arrived by challenging for the America’s Cup — essentially to boost his business and social prospects.
The Americans thrashed him 4-0 when the contest was sailed in 1974. Three years later he was back again, and again lost.
The day after his America’s Cup victory in 1983, Bond persuaded the government to buy his interest in a diamond mining company for millions more than the equivalent on the stock exchange. The same government rented a Bond office building at twice the going rate. There were more deals, and evidence surfaced that Bond’s private company, Dallhold, was drawing huge benefits from his public companies. By then the government had to preserve Bond from disaster.
Ultimately Bond’s empire encompassed breweries and gold mines in Australia and the U.S., newspapers, a television network for which he paid $730 million, telecommunications in Chile, property in Australia, Britain, New York, Hong Kong and Rome; coal, nickel, copper, oil, airships, satellites in space and more.
His biographer, Paul Barry, estimated that this mass floated on $7.6 billion to $10.2 billion of borrowed money. Out in the South Pacific, the Cook Islands provided Bond with a tax haven. Bond ran great yachts and jets and maintained a significant art collection. In April 1992 he was bankrupt, and soon after was sentenced to two and a half years in jail for soliciting money.
He spent three months at a minimum security prison farm and was acquitted at a retrial in 1992. Further convictions for deception and periods of imprisonment followed before he was finally released in 2000, by which time he was building a second fortune based on oil and diamonds, having been released from bankruptcy in 1995.
Paul Barry concluded that Bond lost $3.8 billion of other people’s money.
Alan Bond is survived by two sons and a daughter; another daughter died in 2000.