Laila Pierson
Lanchon Chamorro
119 South Marine Drive
Tsai Building A-2
Tamuning, GU 96931
(671) 632-5120
SisterMary
Technical Advisor:

Mahalo

SIGNATURE:
Clifford "RAY" Hackett www.rayis.me

I founded www.adapt.org in 1980 it now has over 50 million members.
$500 of material=World’s fastest hydrofoil sailboat. http://sunrun.biz

On Wed, Mar 2, 2016 at 1:12 PM, Ray Hackett <3659745> wrote:

as at:Shysters have long trawled the South Pacific with schemes to extract millions from gullible locals, writes Rowan Callick

IT’S fitting that Peter Foster should end up in jail in Vanuatu, the island where James Michener wrote Tales of the South Pacific, the source of the classic musical by Rodgers and Hammerstein. For Foster is part of a long line of international confidence tricksters who have washed up on the Pacific islands to conjure cash from governments, conniving politicians
or naive locals.

The Pacific attracts them because it is comparatively cheap to live there, because the islanders are hospitable and accept guests at face value, because institutions are mostly weak and unlikely to dig up their past misdemeanours, and because the tyranny of distance can protect them from pursuers.

Foster, captured on Sunday by Vanuatu police as he tried to escape through a window from the Port Vila home of friends Wayne and Celeste Furness, until recently Gold Coast antique dealers, faces charges in Vanuatu of illegal entry, in Fiji of fraud and immigration infringements, and in the Federated States of Micronesia over a $580,000 scam. He attempted to escape Justice in Fiji by providing the new military regime with evidence of corruption within the old government it had removed. In Vanuatu he’s brokered a deal that should allow him to return to Brisbane, by ratting on Kell Walker and his crew, who allegedly helped him flee Fiji on Retriever1, a converted navy minesweeper.

Betraying key contacts is a common strategy among conmen who get caught, and reveals another remarkable feature of their story in the Pacific: they have been able to gain ready social access, often within remarkably short periods, to presidents and prime ministers, police chiefs and judges.

Most are men, but there’s been one remarkable woman, Princess Laila. She flew in 1992 to Papua New Guinea, where she was greeted royally. Foreign minister Michael Somare – now the Prime Minister – deputed his chief of staff to travel around the country with her as she investigated options for the $57 billion she claimed to be preparing to invest. Her credentials essentially consisted of her claim that she was a grand-daughter of deceased Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie.

Mekere Morauta was then managing director of the PNG Banking Corporation. He says she arrived in his office "dressed in a flowing white robe, like an angel", and paraded her bangles, allegedly worth $US250,000 each, and her "million-dollar" necklace. Her jewellery, she said, demonstrated her access to large sums of money provided by Middle Eastern royalty, held in Swiss banks. The PNG government could borrow this at low interest rates, and the agents – led by herself would naturally be entitled to handsome commissions, which she would generously share with senior PNG politicians and bureaucrats. She focused on attempting to gain access to the Lihir gold project, which has since become a considerable mine.

On arrival on Lihir island, where a cargo cult was flourishing, she introduced herself to landowners as a fellow Third World victim of rapacious Westerners and as an alternative developer of the resource.

Actually, she held a US passport. Her name was Laila Pierson and she operated out of a general store in the US territory of Guam, where hopeful Lihir landowners vainly faxed requests for financial help using her codename, Mommy.

When Morauta became prime minister, he found PNG besieged by confidence tricksters. In 2000 he halted negotiations between the Milne Bay provincial government and the Knights of Malta, Sovereign Order, Hospitallers of St John of Jerusalem, Foundation of Poland, who were about to gain a guarantee licensing them to raise $200 million.

When Paul Pora was finance minister of PNG, he authorised John Alexander de l’Instant-Parade of Brisbane, a migrant Dutch chef also known as John Smith, to raise $US800 million internationally. The commission would have totalled
$US80million. De l’Instant-Parade also discussed with PNG ministers plans to set up oil and gold refineries, a tanker fleet and a fish cannery. He said: "I’m ot in it for personal gain. I’m anti-colonial. I’m a Scorpio: tough but fair."

A former economic adviser to PNG said that during that era, a dozen years ago, "you’d go in to a minister’s office and be introduced to an oddball with a big briefcase who said he had a billion dollars to lend to PNG", including a fake former mayor of Tehran seeking an up-front fee to obtain a loan for the beleaguered government.

Brisbane-bred Peter Walker was then accelerating his bid to snatch a PNG Highlands gold project from Placer Pacific. But, as lawyer Peter Lowing then said: "The only mining he has done is at the stock exchange." The former chief executive of Private Blood Bank, who had been sentenced to two years’ jail in 1993 over the company’s amazing share price rise – aided by hints of its discovery of a cure for AIDS – paid for 16 Papua New Guineans, including key landowners, to visit Sydney, telling them he could raise $920 million in Hong Kong for the mine by floating a firm of which he would be
managing director.

Walker’s associates escorted the group in a lift to the Placer office near Circular Quay, and a photo of them was taken with the Placer logo in the background, after which they immediately descended in the same lift. The apparent object was to enable the group to return with the photos as proof that while they had talked with Placer, they could get a better deal
from Walker.

The Porgera mine’s approval was consequently delayed when, on their return, the landowners told their fellows that the new Walker deal would provide each of them with a fully furnished Swiss chalet-style two-storey home and a vehicle, and a super mansion for the provincial premier.

Even long-closed mines hold a lure for colourful foreigners. On September 30, 2004, self-styled Prince Jeffrey Richards of Rockhampton and Lord James Nessbit of London arrived in Bougainville on a plane chartered from the Gold Coast that landed illegally, leading to the pilots and owner being fined $146,000. Wearing camouflage uniforms and carrying side-arms, they immediately took up roles as advisers to Francis Ona, the rebel leader who had shut down the mine and was by then calling himself King Francis. He later committed suicide.

The prince and the lord held the royal seals for Me’ekamui, the tiny mountainous kingdom ruled by Ona.

Peter Tsiamalili, co-ordinator of the successful election that restored autonomous government to Bougainville, said at the time: "These two conmen are taking Francis for a ride. The people up on the mountain are totally convinced: they will believe any white man up there. (Richards and Nessbit) are telling them they are related to Queen Elizabeth II."

Nauru’s 8000 inhabitants were once the richest people per head in the world because of their share of the phosphate mined on their island, largely by workers from elsewhere in the Pacific. But in the past few years they have struggled to stave off bankruptcy. Their investments have frequently been hijacked in bizarre directions. A couple of years ago, the Nauru government suddenly announced that a firm from India, Hiranandani Corp Worldwide, would obtain half the Nauru Phosphate Royalties Trust’s properties and manage the entire portfolio.

The firm was run by brothers Raj and Asok, who come from Singapore and did property business there and in Sydney. They shared a white Rolls-Royce Corniche with the name Royal Brothers etched on the side in gold leaf. They were jailed in Singapore in 1999 for a year, charged with criminal breach of trust.

In 1993, Nauru’s then investment adviser Duke Minks, an entrepreneur from Liverpool, England, diverted $4.24 million in phosphate royalties into a musical on the life of Leonardo da Vinci that he co-wrote and produced. Leonardo, Portrait of Love premiered in London to a black-tie audience that included 150 Nauruans, led by then president Bernard Dowiyogo and most of the cabinet. One review was headlined: Night of the Guano. It closed within a month.

After Fiji suffered its first successful coup almost 20 years ago, a military march through Suva was shunned by the upset inhabitants but cheered on by New Zealander Paul Freeman, dressed in long khaki shorts, socks and sandals, who handed out business cards purporting to prove his membership of the US Intelligence Service.

He subsequently accompanied members of the new regime on a trip to purchase arms in Southeast Asia, before falling out with them, after which he shifted to PNG and Solomon Islands, reinventing his background each time. He achieved a record of sorts by being declared persona non grata in all three places.

But perhaps the most colourful of all this cast is Nath Ghosh, an Indian who was based in Thailand five years ago when he saw a great opening in Vanuatu. Usually cream-suited, with chunky rings on each finger, he resembles Orson Welles and was last heard of in Munich, where he swallowed a knife to avoid being extradited to India, where he was wanted on charges brought by several bankers, for obtaining cheques worth $11million in fictitious names.

He took an 82kg rock to Vanuatu, claiming it contained the world’s biggest ruby, worth $317 million, and deposited it in a bank. In return he sought from the government bearer bonds worth $574 million, 140 per cent of the then gross domestic product, which quadrupled Vanuatu’s foreign debt. He was also given forest, fishing and mineral concessions by then prime minister Barak Sope, who travelled internationally with him.

After losing power, Sope, a former student radical who attended Melbourne’s Essendon Grammar School, was jailed for three years for having forged signatures on bonds worth $33 million for Ghosh. He later won a presidential pardon on account of ill health, in time to campaign and win back his old seat at a parliamentary election.

Maxime Carlot Korman, a former prime minister, gave a gushing press conference in Port Vila about a visit with Ghosh to what he called a spectacular Thai resort that Ghosh apparently co-owned with the Thai Princess Mother, whom Korman described as an extremely resourceful person, who should be invited on a state visit. The much loved Princess Mother, Sangwal Talapat, had died five years earlier.

Rowan Callick is The Australian’s China correspondent. He has worked extensively in PNG and the Pacific.