Even in those heady days, Skase had a very loose grasp of exactly whose money he was dealing with. Right to the end of his colourful life, he never seemed to be able to differentiate between his money and a loan. To him, it was all his money. And there were early warning signs. One acquisition by his publicly listed company was Hardy Brothers Jewellers. In 1979, on his way to the Melbourne Cup, Skase realised he had forgotten his money. There were no ATMs in those days, and everything in Victoria was closed for the race-day public holiday. Unperturbed, Skase stopped off at a Hardy Brothers jewellery store and took cash from the safe. What shareholders?
Similarly, Pixie, who became known for her bouffant blonde hair and glittering diamonds, would ‘borrow’ giant rocks from the store for her personal use. She lost one diamond earring down the gutter at their home in Toorak, but never made any efforts to replace it.
The immaculately turned-out couple had all the accoutrements of success, but never fitted in to the Melbourne corporate and social scene, which Skase moaned was closely guarded by a few snooty families. ‘They do not readily warm to and embrace outsiders, interlopers like myself. I may as well have been from Argentina,’ he once said.
Instead they moved to Brisbane — BrisVegas — in Queensland. Skase spoke passionately of how it was vital for young Australians that the government differentiate between the public service and the free enterprise economy. And he heaped praise on former Queensland premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen: ‘I think his track record stands on a par with Menzies as one of the two greatest politicians and political leaders and managers that this country has ever seen,’ he said. This is the same Bjelke-Petersen whose government was found to be so corrupt by the Fitzgerald Inquiry that three of his ministers, including the police minister, were jailed for corruption, and the hillbilly dictator himself was tried for perjury. Exactly the sort of place where the dynamic Mr Skase could do business.
To Pixie, Brisbane was nowhere near as classy as Melbourne. But she made the best of it, personally supervising the purchase and demolition of two stately houses overlooking the river at Bromley, and the building of Hamilton, a giant three-storey pile that had a marble hallway on the first floor that was guarded by a life-size statue of Julius Caesar. Naturally, it was furnished with expensive original tapestries and oil paintings. They threw week-long $450,000 parties that Pixie would have catered by her favourite Melbourne chef and decorated by her favoured Melbourne florist. Stylist Paul Adorna would be flown up from Victoria just to do her hair. On one occasion, Skase used his corporate jet to fly from Port Douglas to Melbourne to pick up a dress that Pixie wanted.
Their lavish lifestyle was funded by Skase’s move into the tourism industry; in 1987, he built the Mirage resort that put Port Douglas on the map. More Mirage resorts were then built on the Gold Coast and in Hawaii, which helped pay for a sleek $6-million ocean-going cruiser called the Mirage III that was furnished luxuriously with beautiful antiques. In 1988, Skase celebrated his fortieth birthday with a party that blew the budget in terms of extravagant opulence. Bill Jones, Skase’s former bodyguard, told the ABC that the party ‘was an eye opener and it cost a lot of money. The theme was Tuscany. Lights were all over the place – like many lights and fairy lights and so forth – and just set the place off. I filled up the swimming pool right to the top and put more lights up and that was very good, it looked like a sheet of glass.’
A year later, Skase was broke.
Interest rates were rocketing, and he had borrowed heavily to build his resorts and buy more companies. A bitter national pilots’ strike stopped visitors flying to his five-star resorts just as it became apparent that he had dramatically overextended himself. In classic Skase style, he tried to buy his way out of trouble, putting in a $1.2-billion bid to buy Hollywood giant MGM/United Artists in 1989. Another Australian, Rupert Murdoch, beat him to the post. Skase then tried to buy himself time by selling a 49 per cent stake in Mirage resorts to Japanese investors for $433 million. But in 1989, his debts were so great that his over-hocked empire needed $30 million a month just to stand still.
Skase knew he was in trouble. Standing in the kitchen, he told his personal bodyguard, Bill Jones, in an uncharacteristic moment of bleak honesty: ‘Oh, things are gonna get worse Bill … I’m not a financial wizard.’
Skase had managed to keep hold of his Qintex empire by having at its head a privately owned company called Kahmea Investments, which was also heavily in debt. Skase used a company called Qintex Group Management Services to funnel cash out of the main businesses to pay the interest. It was all dodgy accounting — he would charge himself $1 million to give himself some advice. Not that he took it. In 1989, $100 million flowed through Qintex Group Management Services, $12.6 million of which found its way into Kahmea.
Things came to a head in October that year at a board meeting at the Intercontinental Hotel in Sydney. Skase wanted approval for a further $79.5 million to be paid to Qintex Group Management Services — $12.5 million of which would be paid to Kahmea. Newly appointed non-executive director Ted Harris, a former boss of petrol giant Ampol, and Victorian Queen’s Counsel Fred Davey were not having a bar of it. Skase was furious — he had already paid himself the money and expected the directors to simply rubbers-tamp the decision. The meeting dragged into the night. Skase argued he needed the money, because he was not paid enough. The directors asked him to leave the room while they voted on a new salary package. When he came back, they made Skase an offer of $1.5 million, which Skase rejected, adding he would quit if offered anything less than $5 million. For their part, Harris and Davey said they would quit if he did not pay back those unauthorised payments. The meeting ended in a stand-off, but the writing was on the wall. Harris left and raised his concerns with the corporate watchdog, the National Companies and Securities Commission. In November, Qintex went into receivership.
As the empire collapsed, Skase got busy. He sold the Brisbane riverfront mansion for $5 million. Then he set about looting his own treasure. Skase’s son-in-law and right-hand man Lawrence van der Plaat later wrote a bitter tell-all book about his time with Skase, titled Too Good to be True: Inside the Corrupt World of Christopher Skase. It was a bitter betrayal from one of Skase’s trusted inner-circle who had been the partner of his stepdaughter Alex. Van der Plaat had helped with everything, business and personal. He knew where the skeletons were buried. In his book, he described how they stripped the Qintex yacht, Mirage III: ‘While a liveried barman served drinks, Pixie found some Louis Vuitton bags and cases and went through the ship, filling them full of carvings, Hermès ashtrays, cutlery, crockery and all the objets d’art she could lay her hands on.’ At their condominium in Port Douglas, bodyguard Bill Jones had to wait until the security guards were not watching one night, so that he’d have ‘adequate time to get the vehicle in, load it up, slam the door, write a letter and bug out’, he said.
The spoils of their extravagant life included two Rolls Royces and a BMW, fifteen Bang & Olufsen TVs and stereos, a complete gymnasium, a marble dining table, dining chairs, sofas, antique chairs, and enough bedroom furniture for nine bedroom suites. Among the antiques, paintings and valuables was a complete silver service to go with the Spode and Royal Doulton dinner services, three ormolu clocks worth $300,000 in total and a Roman sculpture of a male torso. Everything was shipped to England in containers marked for Pixie’s daughter and van der Plaat’s wife, Alexandra Frew. The loot was then left to ‘cool’ in storage for a year, in a bid to throw investigators off the scent, before being shipped to the Spanish island of Majorca, where van der Plaat had helped Skase and Pixie find a villa in the quiet fishing village of Puerto Andratx, near the capital, Palma.
It was all paid for with money that Skase secretly shifted out of Australia using family members as cover. Pixie’s father moved almost $2 million on Skase’s instruction, but was later found to have been an unwitting accomplice. According to van der Plaat, Skase also told Pixie’s daughter Alex to pay $2 million from her London bank acc
ount into a secure Austrian Länderbank account, so that he would be able to spend his money without it being traced.
Skase had shifted his money out of the country but he still needed to get himself out in order to enjoy it.
* * *
‘I’ve got to admit, I didn’t think I’d make this flight,’ said Christopher Skase on 21 September 1990, leaning back in his seat in the first-class cabin as the flight attendant topped up his champagne flute. The king of the corporate cowboys had just pulled off another miraculous escape from his Australian creditors.
Not that he was about to admit any wrongdoing. ‘The socialists are determined to plant something on me, but the judge accepted our plan hook, line and sinker,’ he told van der Plaat, who was seated next to him. ‘A toast,’ he said as he smiled, the enormous relief he clearly felt making him unusually loquacious. ‘Thank you, Your Honour, and here’s to Halcyon and the next decade of growth.’
Skase was on his way back to Europe and scarcely believing his luck. He had spent the previous week before Judge Wylie, giving evidence about the collapse of a Brisbane shipbuilder named Lloyds Shipping Holdings (no relation to the British bank). He had made it to court on the morning of Monday, 17 September 1990, just fifteen minutes before a warrant was to be issued for his arrest.
‘I have attended, without exception, every hearing, tribunal and court case that I have ever been requested to attend,’ he protested to the beak. In reality, he had used every illness and excuse possible to try to avoid being in court that week. And there was no way he intended to be stuck in Australia. If the court had attempted to seize his passport, his bodyguard, Bill Jones, had arranged for him to take a domestic flight to Cairns where he would board a light plane and fly to Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea. Christopher Skase was not going to be held to account for the $172 million in personal debt and $1.5 billion in interest and loans owed to banks with the collapse of Qintex. Instead he was allowed to keep his passport and was able to jet out of Australia, breathing a big sigh of relief and scarcely believing his good fortune.
Skase never gave up the dream of living in Australia, he just did not want to do it in a jail cell. When he realised the writing was on the wall, he fled. He could not believe how the Australian public had turned against him, and would argue that his family had lost more than anyone. He was not living in luxury but modestly in Majorca, completely missing the point that this was luxury compared to the jail cell most Aussies wanted to see him in.
The Skases claimed to be renting the high-walled estate called La Noria because, Skase assured authorities and creditors in Australia, he had no assets. In reality, he had bought the villa for $3 million through a complex arrangement that involved a Russian prince, also designed to confound investigators. While Skase busied himself with plans for his next empire, Halcyon, Pixie got down to the remodelling. She did not cut any corners. A new $100,000 marble kitchen, complete with walk-in fridges and commercial ovens, was installed. The bedrooms were redecorated and the bathrooms extended. The Skases’ suite had a balcony with views across to the port and the glittering Mediterranean. One room was devoted solely to Pixie’s huge collection of dresses and clothes, and another to her hundreds of pairs of shoes that lay in two-metre-tall Imelda-Marcos-inspired racks. Meanwhile, Skase’s dressing room was packed with 50 tailor-made suits and his enormous collection of Hermès silk ties. Outbuildings around the swimming pool were converted into guest residences and offices for Skase and the new Halcyon group.
Skase had used all his guile to squirrel away his cash and assets, but he knew that, back in Australia, the Australian Securities Commission was building up a case against him. He had given an undertaking to appear in the Southport Magistrates Court in Queensland in May 1991 to face charges of assault on a photographer. If he did not go, it would give Australian authorities the excuse they needed to begin extradition proceedings. He had already used Asian flu, diarrhoea, a bad back, migraines and a sudden development of emphysema to avoid flying back, and now he had run out of excuses.
He appeared in court on 27 May 1991. During an adjournment in the proceedings, he was waiting in a small anteroom when the Australian Federal Police burst in and arrested him. He was charged with two counts of failing his duties as a company director over the payment of fees to his private company, Kahmea. Each charge carried a $20,000 fine and a maximum of five years in jail. According to van der Plaat, as the charges were being read to him, Skase began to shake uncontrollably. As the officers led him to the cells beneath the court, he implored: ‘Just get me out, whatever you have to do, just get me out of this today.’ Upon hearing news of his arrest, Pixie collapsed.
Skase’s lawyers managed to persuade the magistrate that a bail of $1.2 million was far too much and instead $100,000 was more than adequate. Pixie’s father stumped up half the money and, after two hours, Skase was released from the holding cell. Van der Plaat, Jones and Skase’s other son-in-law, Tony Larkins, were waiting for him in the courthouse anteroom. Van der Plaat was shocked at the dramatic change the two hours in the communal cell had had on Skase. His Mediterranean tan had faded and his normally healthy features were drawn and pale. He looked older. Van der Plaat was stunned when Skase came out, pulled up a chair, bowed his head over the cheap table and began to sob, as those around him looked on in embarrassed and uncomfortable silence.
Christopher Skase was never setting foot inside a prison cell again. Desperate to save his skin, he hatched a plan to get himself back to Spain. Publicly, he gave the impression that he was fighting attempts to have him declared bankrupt. Privately, he called together 22 of his old friends who were owed money from dealings with Qintex and then, in closed proceedings, declared himself bankrupt. That meant all legal proceedings against him would automatically have to stop.
Next came the appointment of a trustee in bankruptcy, who would hold Skase’s passport as security. The banks, who were owed more than $170 million, found themselves outvoted by Skase’s 22 mates, who were owed just $80,000 between them. They gave the nod to Skase’s chosen trustee, Neville Pocock from Brisbane accounting firm Bentleys. Twenty-four hours later, Skase asked Pocock for his passport and, counter to the desires of all the lawyers, government departments and debtors who wanted Skase to stay in Australia and face the music, Pocock handed it over. Skase wasted no time in getting on the next plane out of Brisbane and back to Majorca.
It took another three years for Australian authorities to get a case for extradition together. In the meantime, according to van der Plaat, Skase had befriended the mysterious Russian prince Tchukotua, who had sold him the La Noria villa. The prince’s wife was allegedly the King of Spain Juan Carlos’s mistress. The prince apparently had no problem with the arrangement, and Skase could see how it could work for him. He began working on currying support from the Spanish hierarchy, with the prince’s help. He was also busy setting up deals with Spanish business contacts, who had no problems with his dubious dealings in Australia. If anything, they regarded it as a badge of honour and nicknamed him ‘the Silver Fox’.
Back in Australia, the role of trustee in bankruptcy had moved from Pocock into the determined hands of dogged Max Donnelly, a career insolvency expert who over the years also handled the bankruptcies of Robert Trimbole and Dr Geoffrey Edelstein and the estate of Lang Hancock. Mr Donnelly was discovering for himself how careful Skase had been in hiding the money trail. ‘As I’ve found out, the Austrian banks are difficult to obtain information from … [it’s] probably a good destination if you want to put money somewhere that can be difficult to investigate,’ Donnelly told the ABC. He said he had managed to trace about $10 million, but added, ‘Of course, it’s always what you haven’t traced that is the unknown and the worrying aspect.’
The breakthrough for Australian authorities came from Skase’s former confidante van der Plaat, who turned on his boss after Skase broke his promise and sold his and Alex’s London house from under them. Like all things with Skase, it was smoke and mirrors, a
nd everything given could be taken back. Sick of the excuses, the lies, and ‘remorseless use’ of himself and other members of Pixie’s family, van der Plaat tried to opt out of the ‘The Firm’. He knew where the skeletons were buried, the hidden assets, the new business plans and Skase’s defence strategies. The Australian Securities Commission was delighted to hear it from such a good source. In response, Skase sent round the heavies. One day when van der Plaat was home at his London flat, he heard a noise, so he went to investigate. The front door was ripped from its hinges and van der Plaat was shoulder-charged in the ribs.
Lying on the ground, he glared at the distorted face of a man standing above him.
‘You know who sent us,’ the man growled. Van der Plaat recognised the voice as that of Bill Jones. Jones was out of breath. ‘If you ever give evidence against him or talk to the press, you’re finished. We’ll find you, wherever you go … This is your only warning.’
Skase’s bodyguard gave the ABC a different version: ‘During the scuffle — and it’s not a fight, it was a scuffle — [van der Plaat] kneed me in the groin and I said, “Oh, you’re gonna go.” And I started whacking him a little bit, you know, pushing him around and he kept saying “Oh God, don’t hit me in the face, for God’s sake, don’t hit me in the face.” So I’d no intention of doing that.’ Though he did add that he did not think his boss would have been particularly unhappy if Mr van der Plaat had fallen over and hurt himself during the altercation.
Meanwhile, Skase used the time it took the Australian Securities Commission to get a case for extradition together to show he had a lung disease that meant any form of travel to Australia, even by boat, would kill him. Pictures showed him in a wheelchair wearing an oxygen mask. He got away with it, despite doctors revealing that the angle of the mask meant he was getting no benefit from the oxygen. Even the release of tourist footage, showing him walking energetically along the beach, failed to persuade Spanish authorities that he should be extradited. Skase became Australia’s most despised fugitive. He gave interviews from Majorca attacking his homeland: ‘I have no desire to return to Australia while this regime remains in office and, if you look at it in World War II terms, Keating is Hitler and Murdoch is Goebbels. I don’t think there’s any doubt that the exercise is purely political.’
Dirty Rotten Scoundrels Page 10