TO THE disgust of thousands of small investors whose life savings he stole, Alan Bond is rich again.

The disgraced former Australian billionaire and bankrupt, who was jailed for three years in 1997 for plundering millions of dollars from shareholders, returned to Australia’s Rich List last week, with a personal fortune estimated to be worth somewhere in the region of $265m (£128m).

Bond’s financial rehabilitation has also come with a clean bill of health. Miraculously, he no longer appears to suffer from the brain damage that he claimed prevented him from remembering the location of his offshore fortune in 1994.

His return to the dress circle of Australia’s richest 200 — he is ranked 157th — follows his highly speculative investments in the mining boom in Africa. They include gold mines in Botswana, Tanzania and Liberia, the Lesotho Diamond Corporation and Madagascar Oil. None has yet yielded a profit.

Bond’s previous incarnation, Bond Corp, collapsed in 1990 with debts of more than $2 billion; Bond’s personal debts exceeded $600m. Unable, or unwilling, to pay back shareholders, he was declared bankrupt. When asked where the missing assets were, his memory failed. Subsequent investigations into his complex business empire revealed an offshore portfolio of property, paintings and cash held in Swiss bank accounts.

Henry Bosch, who as former chairman of Australia’s National Companies and Securities Commission led the Bond fraud investigation, said last week: “My first reaction is of sympathy for the thousands who lost their life savings which now provide the basis of Bond’s wealth. 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.”

“Bondy”, as he used to be affectionately known, has come full circle in spectacular style. The London lad, who moved to Australia as a boy, dropped out of his Perth school and became a sign writer. His energy and tenacity swiftly earned him a reputation as a canny property investor, and his wealth grew. In 1978 he was proclaimed Australian of the year, but it was in 1983 that he became a folk hero in his adopted country, when his yacht took the America’s Cup trophy from the US for the first time in 132 years.

Bond’s global business interests prospered, and he splashed out on a private jet, two yachts, and huge estates in Perth, Sydney and London. He bought Van Gogh’s Irises painting for £32m — at the time, the highest price ever paid for a work of art — and at one stage owned the Oxfordshire village of Glympton.

At its height, Bond Corp owned the brewer Castlemaine XXXX, and had stakes in Allied-Lyons, TV-am and British Satellite Broadcasting. However, his attempt to buy the British company Lonrho failed and its then chief executive, Tiny Rowland, revealed that Bond Corp was “technically insolvent”, with huge debts.

In 1996 Bond was sentenced to three years in prison for corporate fraud and deception, having used shareholders’ funds to buy Manet’s painting La Promenade, which he then sold back to his family at a knock-down price.

In 1997 he was sentenced to a further seven years for admitting syphoning money from Bell Resources, an oil company he bought from the late tycoon Robert Holmes à Court after the 1987 stock-market crash.

Consigned to the top-security Casuarina jail, Bond served three years, and famously requested a two-week extension to his prison term in order to complete an inmates’ art course. Bond took up painting in jail, and sold one painting, of an Australian Rules footballer, to a local Perth brothel for £10,000. “I think Alan’s wonderful,” said the brothel’s madame, Mary-Anne Kenworthy, at the time.

Banned from being a director in Australia, Bond moved to London on his release from jail in 2000. Not seeing a future as an artist, he re-entered the business world.

His first deal was to acquire a substantial stake in the Lesotho Diamond Corporation. At the time, the company’s prospectus stated that it owned the rights to the Kao kimberlite pipe in Lesotho’s Butha-Buthe district which, it claimed, contained diamonds “conservatively valued” at £1.8 billion — according to Bond’s son Craig. Bond himself was described as a “consultant” in the prospectus.

The Bond family stake in the new diamond venture was registered offshore for tax reasons — a continuation of the structure that so eluded creditors’ attempts to find Bond’s assets in 1995. His investments in two other stock-market floats, a gold project in Tanzania and an oil operation in Madagascar, are similarly registered offshore.

Today Bond lives in a plush London apartment, which he reportedly rents for more than $2m a year.

Back in Australia, meanwhile, his former shareholders are fuming. Many lost their life savings to his deception and fraud and believe that his new wealth has been built on assets that were rightly theirs.

Bosch said Bond had escaped lightly: “I would have preferred it if he was put away for life. It is amazing. If the man was honourable he’d be thinking about paying back something to his creditors.

“I have no doubt of Bond’s extraordinary financial skill and persuasiveness and I have no doubt of the great gullibility of a large part of the human race.”

Bosch said he also felt for the people now involved in Bond’s money-making schemes in Africa — a sensitive issue for Bond himself.

The entrepreneur’s personal website states that he promises the “impoverished” folk of the African nations that they will share the “huge potential income stream” when his mining companies make a profit.

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