He humiliated the Blairs. So is the game now finally up?
CAN it be only last month that Peter Foster, regretful and newly contemplative, declared himself to be a reformed character? A month ago the serial conman said he was writing his memoirs in an act of catharsis that would set him on the path to a better sort of life.
As he told me when I interviewed him, his wheeler- dealer days were over. He was enjoying a quiet, simple, bachelor life, in his late mother’s house on Australia’s Gold Coast.
Fast-forward six weeks and it’s already gone wrong. Yesterday’s arrest took place on a remote stretch of beach in Port Douglas, Queensland, where Foster was out walking his two chihuahua crosses, Luigina and Che Che.
Sitting on the sand, in handcuffs, there was a look of resignation on his face that has not been there before. Perhaps, this time, the game really is up.
According to reports in Australia, it seems that Foster left his home on the Gold Coast after becoming aware that the police were on to him.
A friend tells the Mail that it is believed he moved out about four weeks ago, drove up to Port Douglas, more than 1,000 miles away, and took a threemonth rental on a property.
It has been reported that Foster was planning to flee Australia in a yacht. But a friend says this cannot be the case.
‘That is bull****,’ explains the friend. ‘He would not have left under our current corona regulations, they would have busted him straight up.’
While those he has defrauded over the years may say he deserves no better – he is alleged to have set up a bogus sports company as a front to scam money – Foster’s friend is critical of the arrest.
‘Peter is old, overweight and unfit, he was walking his dogs on the beach, and the police acted out a very dramatic arrest, dressed as joggers, and surfers, and beachgoers, and then executed a wild tackle on Peter as he was walking. All for the TV crew in attendance.’
As well as declaring he now wanted ‘to lead a better sort of life’ last month, Foster talked about the events that led to so-called Cheriegate.
When the drama unfolded back in 2002, Peter Foster had already acquired a degree of infamy for his Bai Lin Tea which he had asserted was an ‘ancient Chinese diet secret’ – but was later found to be just green tea.
BACK then, he was going out with Carole Caplin, fitness trainer to the Blairs, whose constant presence at the couple’s side was a source of fascination and perplexity to political observers.
Mrs Blair wanted to buy two flats in Bristol, and was keen to secure a discount. Foster, was enlisted to do the job on her behalf. On his 40th birthday in September 2002, he says he and Carole were whisked through Downing Street security to collect a present Cherie wanted to give him.
‘It was late and Cherie was in bed, so Carole collected it. It was a black attache case, with my initials on it, the same one, Carole told me, that they’d given as a gift to President George W Bush.’
The sale of the flats went through. The Blairs ended up paying £262,000 for each property – a favourable discount of £69,000 in total. Unfortunately a newspaper got hold of the story which led to the Blairs initially denying his involvement, then admitting it.
As far as Foster was concerned, he found his services were no longer required by the Blairs and within weeks was on a plane back to Australia.
Recollecting the episode in his interview last month, Foster indicated that his brush with the Blairs was one of the more difficult episodes of his life.
‘I absolutely regret ever getting involved with the Blairs.’ The feeling, we can be sure, is mutual. Back in Australia, Foster was now 18,000 miles away from the Blairs, but it wasn’t far enough.
He continued to generate headlines regarding this scam or that scam, and, inevitably, each report was invariably accompanied by a neat summary of Cheriegate.
There were spells in jail. One dramatic arrest took place in 2014 when he was taken unawares putting out the bins at another address in Byron Bay, New North South Wales, while on the run.
By 2016, Foster was promoting a diet spray called SensaSlim. It sounded promising, its miracle properties having been validated by the Swiss Institut de Recherche Intercontinental, no less.
Sadly, investigators later discovered that the Institut was a fictitious construct.
Foster was last jailed after using alias Mark Hughes to secure investment for an offshore betting business. After his release in 2018, he appeared to have settled down to a quieter sort of life, caring for his elderly mother, Louise, a former real estate agent who died aged 88 in May this year.
Last month, he announced he was a changed man.
But then, just a few weeks later, Michele Deakin, a 51-year- old former Young Slimmer of the Year, told the Mail that Foster had seduced her.
She claimed she met him aged 19, he introduced her to the high life, proposed to her, got her pregnant and then promptly vanished when police began investigating another business he had set up.
She said her twin girls, Rachael and Rebecca, she gave birth to in February 1991, are his.
Foster denies this and told the Mail: ‘Unless I sh***ed her from 18,000 miles then it’s complete bull****,’ claiming he has also offered to take a DNA test.
Soon afterwards, he drove up to Port Douglas, scene of the latest arrest. It follows reported claims by private investigator, Ken Gamble, that he has been alerted to fresh accusations of a betting scam by ‘a businessman in Asia’.
KEN Gamble is Foster’s nemesis: the investigator has been after him for years. Indeed, Gamble claimed on Australian TV in June that that Foster had once planned to hire a hitman to kill him.
‘This was first said five years ago,’ Foster said last month. ‘It was false then and it’s false now. It was investigated and no one was arrested.’
So, Foster has never planned murder. But are the gambling allegations true?
Well, even Peter Foster is innocent until found guilty. But if you were a betting person...