KEY POINTS:
Some people are very difficult to get rid of.
Enemies of the London-born Alan Bond - of whom he had many - could reasonably hope they had heard the last of him when the prison gates shut behind him in Australia more than a decade ago.
His business empire had collapsed in one of the biggest bankruptcy scandals in world history and he was starting a long prison sentence for fraud.
But now, incredibly, at the age of 70, he is back among the country's richest people, with a fortune estimated at almost $330 million.
That is a snip compared with what he was thought to be worth in the 1980s, when he claimed to be the world's most-famous Australian by adoption - more famous even than Rupert Murdoch or Kylie Minogue - but not bad for an ex-convict past retirement age.
His business rival, Kerry Packer, once remarked that you only get one Alan Bond in your life, but actually there seem to be two. The new Alan Bond is an Englishman running a large business from a headquarters close to Buckingham Palace. Hopefully, he is more careful than the younger Alan Bond, who became Australia's national hero when his yacht, Australia II, won the America's Cup in 1983, taking away a trophy that the Americans had held for 132 years.
Bond's downfall almost exactly coincided with that of the British publishing tycoon, Robert Maxwell. The cause was the same in each case: greed, vanity and reckless ambition that drove Bond to buy, buy and buy again, hoping to finance the last acquisition from the profits of the next - until the market collapse of 1987 left him high and dry.
As the business collapsed, the toll began to tell. When Bond went to court in 1990 , with personal debts calculated at A$622 million - the second biggest personal bankruptcy in history - he had a kidney infection and was suffering what he called a "very deep state of depression".
He also claimed to be suffering from memory loss, a claim greeted with some scepticism. It emerged that he had bought millions of pounds of diamonds, and a Bentley car for his first wife, Eileen, as his companies slid into bankruptcy.
His daughter Suzanne had been given a necklace worth hundreds of thousands of pounds. His creditors, who eventually received half a cent for every dollar they had invested, wanted to know where the Bond family wealth was stashed away. Bond, it seemed, could not remember.
He did, however, admit that the law had been "stretched" as he struggled to keep his businesses afloat. In 1992, he received a 30-month jail sentence for fraud. He was released after a retrial, but drew a three-year sentence in 1993. In 1997, he was sentenced to another four years. The prosecutor appealed, and the sentence was raised to seven years. It looked very much if the story of Alan Bond, of Western Australia, was over.
Some very rich men stay out of sight, keeping their wealth hidden; other prefer to flaunt it. Bond was a flaunter. He had hundreds of other art works besides that famous Van Gogh, four long-range private jets, and a carbon-fibre yacht with marble floors and interior walls and a dining room that seated 20, which cost thousands of pounds a week in upkeep even when it was moored.
Many of those possessions were lost in the 1990s, but a very large quantity stayed in family trusts, out of the reach of creditors. In 2000, Bond left prison, his seven-year sentence overturned on a technicality, to start all over again.
Whatever pleasure freedom gave him was immediately overshadowed by a ghastly family tragedy. His daughter, Suzanne, arrived in London, jetlagged from a flight from Australia, took morphine and a sleeping tablet, fell into a deep sleep on a sofa and suffocated. It was, Bond said later, "the worst thing in my life".
But it did not stop him. He got that family money working and has accumulated major interests across Africa, notably in diamond mines in Lesotho and oil in Madagascar.
Given the nature of his assets, he is on course to get richer and richer despite the problems in the world economy.
The news has not pleased everyone who knew Alan Bond of old. "My first reaction is of sympathy to the thousands who lost their life savings and which now provide the basis of Bond's wealth," said Henry Bosch, formerly Australia's chief corporate regulator.
"I think it's a defect of our system that a man can pay his creditors half a cent in the dollar and then go on to flaunt his riches."
If Mr Bosch and others had their way, Alan Bond would still be in a prison cell, with little or no prospect of ever being set free.
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