Alan Bond (born 22 April 1938) is a very wealthy and controversial Australian businessman. Bond was born in Hammersmith, England, and emigrated to Australia with his parents and sister Geraldine, in 1950. He was a public hero after bankrolling challenges for the yachting trophy the America's Cup, in 1983 finally winning a trophy which had been held by the USA since 1851. Bond was awarded as Australian of the Year in 1978.

The Perth-based Bond made his fortune initially in Property Development and at one time was one of Australia's most prominent businesspeople. He later extended to other fields including:

Brewing He controlled Castlemaine Tooheys.

Gold Mining

Television He purchased QTQ-9 , Brisbane and paid out an outstanding dispute the station had with the Queensland premier, Joh Bjelke-Petersen for $400,000. He said in a television interview that he paid because Sir Joe left no doubt that if we were going to continue to do business successfully in Queensland then he expected the matter to be resolved. In 1987 he paid $1,000,000,000 for the Australia-wide Nine television network.

Among his flamboyant purchases was Vincent Van Gogh's painting, Irises, for 54 million Australian dollars, but he didn't have enough money to pay for it and it had to be re-sold.

The stock market crash in 1987 was one of a number of factors that led to the downfall of Bond's business empire, and he eventually went to prison for a time over his efforts to hide parts of his accumulated assets from Bond Corporation's receivers. These efforts, however, were somewhat successful; he appears to have retained several luxury properties and other assets sufficient to support a luxurious lifestyle.

Bond was originally jailed in August 1996 for a $15 million charge involving the Manet painting La Promenade. In 1997 he was sentenced to a further four years after pleading guilty to siphoning off $1.2 billion from one of his companies, Bell Resources, to prop up his ailing Bond Corporation.

Paul Barry, a journalist who wrote the book referenced below, has calculated that Bond's release after 1,298 days meant that he spent roughly one day behind bars for every million dollars he stole. Barry pointed to the recent mandatory sentencing in the Northern Territory of a young Aboriginal man to a year's jail for stealing $23 worth of cordial and biscuits. Had the same formula applied to Bond, he would have been imprisoned for 50 million years.

In 1995 Bond and his family bought him out of bankruptcy, using about $12 million they had salted away in trusts to pay off creditors who were owed some $1.8 billion. A payout of about half a cent in the dollar.

References

• Paul Barry The Rise And Fall Of Alan Bond ISBN 1-86359-037-4. Bantam Books (1991)

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Alan Bond (born 1944) is Managing Director of Reaction Engines Ltd [1] http://www.reactionengines.co.uk and associated with Project Daedalus, HOTOL and Skylon.