Christopher Skase: The last of the cowboys

By GREG ANSLEY

CANBERRA - There was little regret, and even less grief, when Christopher Skase died of cancer in Majorca on Monday.

Despite the very human tragedy of the final moments as his wife Pixie fed him ice cubes to ease his passing, and a comparison with Ned Kelly by one of his few remaining Australian friends, a federal MP's tart farewell was typical: "Good riddance."

Australia never forgave the 53-year-old fugitive businessman, who fled the nation after the collapse of his $A1.5 billion ($1.8 billion) Quintex group, and will continue pursuing the fortune he is believed to have smuggled out with him.

The revulsion was reciprocated. Skase swore never to set foot in his homeland again, and stepdaughter Amanda Larkins swore to reporters: "If [Skase's body] was sliced into 50,000 pieces, not one of those would ever reach Australia and I will make sure of that."

Skase was reviled not because of the hundreds of millions of dollars he cost his shareholders - the nation was littered with such failures - but because he refused to stay and take his punishment as others had, because he never once showed remorse, and, worst, because he laughed in Australia's face.

From a mansion in Spain he claimed poverty. For each Australian victory in the fight to bring him home, Skase found a new illness - until the final, fatal disease that no one believed.

Had he stayed and taken the lumps, he would have been just another Ocker cowboy.

Skase rode with a wild bunch during the 80s, moneyslingers with plenty to spend (even if most of it was someone else's), outrageous hubris and no small courage, roaring across a brash land brimming with its own confidence and cheering on the heroes of the new age.

Some were crooks. Others were over-ambitious, incompetent, or simply unlucky. A handful made legitimate fortunes.

The casualty rate, from death or imprisonment, was high.

As they passed, others prospered. Art prices soared to dizzy heights, BMWs and Mercedes choked the streets of the elite areas, private jets zipped from side to side of the continent, the value of homes in the chosen suburbs doubled, even trebled, at the pop of a Dom Perignon cork, and a new language of Armani and Versace raced through the haunts of the nouveau riche.

This was truly the age when a pauper could become a king, provided he (and it was almost exclusively he) could walk the walk, talk the talk and shuffle the paper.

Empires were built on promises, hope, deception or fraud, bound together by intricate webs of cross-shareholdings, alliances and mutual backscratching, propped up by the kind of immense, dangerously fragile, loans that allowed Skase to touch the sky.

In the west it was Alan Bond and his cohorts of the tight little band that gained infamy as WA Inc, an incestuous huddle of entrepreneurs, dodgy financiers and Labor politicians who applied the "Greed is Good" mantra to both private enterprise and public service.

Bond became shorthand for the excesses of the decade.

He may have once been Australian of the Year, taken the America's Cup from the Yanks, been a mate of Labor icon Bob Hawke and even won a grudging, larrikin style of respect for staying home and copping the punishment, but he was a charlatan.

Bond was jailed for Australia's biggest fraud, involving $A1.2 billion, was further jailed and involved in years of litigation over art scams, left thousands of shareholders wallowing in the mire of the $A5 billion collapse of his shonky empire, successfully concealed a $A12 million English mansion behind a European mate, and is widely believed to have siphoned a considerable amount more through the porous sewers of international finance.

Now free and back in Britain, Bond is trying to make it back through usury, in a chain of franchised, high-interest lenders to unfortunates with no other options.

One of his closest business cohorts, Laurie Connell, died during the roundup.

Connell, known as "Last Resort Larry" to desperate borrowers, ran Rothwells bank in Perth, constructing a significant part of the house of cards that was WA Inc, and living the life of conspicuous success expected of the age.

He was close to the then-Labor Government - an unfortunate alliance that ultimately saw two former premiers jailed, despite the much-reported warning from one that no one should ever stand between Laurie and a bag of money.

For years he was like Teflon - nothing stuck, not even his disqualification from horse racing for two years for the Kalgoorlie sting (in which bets were laid after a Melbourne race had been run), the suspicious death of a Perth Cup winner shortly after its victory and the discovery of dope in another horse.

Inevitably, Connell collapsed with the rest in the 1987 crash and ended up before the courts.

Also in the west was the late South African-born Robert Holmes a Court, distanced from Bond, Connell and other WA cowboys by personal and business style, and by a far greater dollop of scruples. But he was an operator nonetheless.

Three of the great plays of the 1980s began with Holmes a Court's dazzling footwork: the takeover of Ansett by TNT and News Ltd (leading ultimately to Air New Zealand's present troubled ownership); the fall of pastoral giant Elders to John Elliott and friends; and the delivery into Rupert Murdoch's hands of Melbourne's Herald and Weekly Times group.

Holmes a Court made buckets from the frenzied share trading for Ansett and Elders, picked up the monopoly Perth morning daily newspaper The West Australian from HWT, and left a very healthy business to his wife Janet.

Across the Nullabor, the eastern states thundered to the hooves of similar riders.

Some were simply tragic - Warwick Fairfax, the youngest of the great Australian newspaper dynasty who bought out his relatives and promptly lost the lot before retiring to anonymity in the US; and the late John Friedrich, who somehow built Victoria's search and rescue network into the National Safety Council and ran up debts of $A235 million before its spectacular demise.

Melbourne was also rocked by the multi-billion collapses of the Estate Mortgage property trust, the Pyramid building society group, and the state-owned Tricontinental merchant bank.

Tricontinental stunned even hardened observers of the 1980s with its huge, reckless loans to bad risks, among them Alan Bond, Skase's family company, Kahmea Investments, and failed New Zealand entrepreneur Graham Hamilton's company Onion String, which left a $A10 million hole in the bank. It imploded in 1989 with losses of $A2.7 billion.

In similar fashion, the South Australian State Bank, whose ill-fated ventures included the takeover of New Zealand's Security Pacific Bank, bit the dust with losses of $A3.1 billion.

The architect of its disaster, former managing director Tim Marcus-Clark, was hit with an unpayable personal bill of $A81 million by the courts and declared bankruptcy with little but his clothes and a $A4200 wine and book collection to comfort him.

The decade was littered with such stories: the Spedley merchant bank, whose key directors were jailed; the Battery group's Philip Carver, jailed for the $A70 million Occidental and Regal life company fraud; the failed Unity-APA Group, whose directors faced court for multi-million-dollar frauds.

There were some true giants who took huge financial gambles but kept on the right side of the narrow divide that separates the daring from the illegal.

John Elliott was one, rising from humble beginnings to shape Australia's biggest corporation, head the Liberal Party and toy with prime ministership, and grasp Ocker culture through both beer and the Carlton Football Club.

Merging jam-maker IXL with Elders in the 1981 Holmes a Court-inspired takeover, Elliott subsequently took over Carlton and United Brewery, won 20 per cent of BHP and a seat on the board, and in 1989 led a $A5 billion management buyout of Elders.

A year later the National Crime Authority moved in for what became a vain, decade-long pursuit of Elliott through - again - the money trails weaving in and out of Switzerland, picking up along the way failed Kiwi businessman Allan Hawkins and his defunct Equitilink group.

Elliott, who left Elders as the authority moved in, is now a rice farmer facing horrendous lawyers' bills from years of litigation, including his bid to sue the authority for its pursuit, and with a new, albeit smaller, set of commercial difficulties.

In Adelaide Latvian-born John Spalvins spent the 1980s building the Adelaide Steamship Co into Adsteam, borrowing heavily to fund acquisitions: retailer David Jones, brewer Tooth & Co, Associated Foods, winemaker Kaiser Stuhl ...

From a market capitalisation of $A23 million in 1977, Spalvins had by 1987 created a commercial titan, capitalised at $A1.5 billion and turning over $A4.5 billion a year.

The end came not with the 1987 crash - despite huge borrowing, a maze of cross-shareholdings and the like - but with the takeover of Sir Ron Brierley's Industrial Equity Ltd.

The resulting scrutiny revealed the fragility of a group whose shares were largely traded between its parts: within a year, Adsteam's June 1990 share price of $A5.60 had plummeted to a mere A7.5c, and dismemberment was inevitable.

Spalvins survived and remains as chief executive of David Jones, with a clutch of directorships.

But in Majorca, Christopher Skase was the last of the cowboys.