Alan Bond

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Alan Bond (born April 22, 1938 in London , United Kingdom , † June 5, 2015 in Perth , Western Australia ) was an Australian entrepreneur . He gained international fame as the owner of Australia II , which won the America's Cup in 1983 . After the sensational bankruptcy of his group of companies in 1992, he had to serve a prison sentence of several years for fraud.

Life

Alan Bond was born in London in 1938. In 1950 his parents emigrated with him to Australia. In 1959, at the age of 19, he founded his first company, Bond Corporation. In Perth and the vicinity of the city he initially built up a real estate business with borrowed money, to which other areas such as breweries, diamond mines, wholesalers, newspapers and television stations were later added in Australia and internationally. In 1982 the Bond Corporation was the largest company in the state of Western Australia .

Bond University sponsored campus

Bond achieved international fame through his participation in the traditional America's Cup sailing tournament. As a ship owner, he first tried in 1974 with the Southern Cross , followed in 1977 and 1980 with the Australia , in vain to win the trophy for Australia, which has always been defended by the Americans since its foundation in 1851. Even if he could not win the cup by then, he received the Australian of the Year award in 1978 for his sporting commitment . Finally, in 1983, he was the first non-American to win the award with the boat Australia II and his crew and to bring the cup, and thus the next competition for the cup, to Australia.

Vincent van Gogh: Irises and Iris Flowers , bought by Bond in 1987 as the most expensive painting in the world at the time, now owned by the Getty Museum

Alan Bond, who had never graduated from college, emerged as a major patron of education in the 1980s. He founded Bond University, the first private university in Australia, whose campus opened in 1987 in Gold Coast . In the same year he made headlines as an art collector. The most expensive piece in his collection was to be the painting Irises by Vincent van Gogh , which Bond acquired for 53.9 million US dollars at the New York auction house Sotheby’s . At first, the public assumed that the price was the highest purchase price ever achieved at an auction, but it was later revealed that Sotheby's had advanced about half the auction price as a loan. After Bond was unable to pay his share of the purchase price in full or repay the loan, the painting was returned to the auction house and later went to the J. Paul Getty Museum for an undisclosed sum .

Bond's financial troubles began with Black Monday's stock market crash , in the wake of which he lost much of his fortune. In 1987, for example, he had acquired the television station Channel Nine Television Network for one billion Australian dollars , which he had to sell again three years later with considerable losses. With more than AU $ 9 billion in debt, the Bond group was declared bankrupt in 1992. Various fraud proceedings followed in this connection, leading to a seven-year prison sentence in 1997. In 2000, Bond was released early and then ran a company in the oil and diamond business with his son Craig.

Bond was married to Eileen Hughes from 1955 until their divorce in 1992. From this marriage there were four children. In 1995 he married the stewardess and later theater producer Diana Bliss. She committed suicide in 2012.

literature

  • Paul Barry: The Rise And Fall Of Alan Bond , Bantam Books, Sydney 1991 ISBN 1-86359-037-4 .
  • Alan Bond, Rob Mundle: Bond , HarperCollins Publishers , Pymble 2004 ISBN 0-7322-7494-X .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Alan Bond dies in Perth hospital after heart surgery complications article on www.abc.net.au
  2. ↑ a b c d e f Australian of the Year 1978, Alan Bond, Entrepreneur and America's Cup Financier ( Memento of May 18, 2012 in the Internet Archive ), accessed on October 26, 2017.
  3. ↑ a b c biography of Alan Bond on PBS television , accessed April 24, 2012.
  4. ↑ a b http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2093920/Alan-Bond-s-depressed-wife-said-couldn-t-going-heart-breaking-suicide-note-brother-reveals .html Report on Diana Bliss's suicide in the online edition of the Dailymail from January 31, 2012.
personal data
SURNAME Bond, Alan
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Australian entrepreneur of British descent
DATE OF BIRTH April 22, 1938
PLACE OF BIRTH London
DATE OF DEATH 5th June 2015
Place of death Perth