As a number of readers, Gerard Ryle's blog and my saved Google News search have informed me, Tim Johnston, former proprietor of the dramatically-failed magic-fuel-pill pseudo-company Firepower, recently flew back into Australia.
I am not alone in being entirely unable to figure out why he did this. Tim was quite successfully hiding from his creditors overseas, but then decided to waltz back into the country using his own passport. ASIC then told all of the airports to not let him out again. And then he surrendered his passport. But then, last night, he went for a little drive, evading process servers.
Don't worry - I'm sure we'll catch him soon. I mean, it's not as if there are many places to hide around here.
UPDATE: And now we hear that Johnston allegedly used a forged letter from ASIC to assure potential investors that he was not in fact being investigated, and had only fled to London for a holiday, or something. Which is kind of like discovering that John Dillinger was also guilty of failing to pay his council rates, but the more charges the merrier, I suppose.
UPDATE 2: The process servers managed to locate Tim and give him the order to appear at a civil hearing, which the Firepower liquidator hopes will lead to criminal charges. He actually turned out to be pretty easy to find, because he obligingly turned up in another court to ask for his passport back.
8 November 2009 at 12:08 am
Heh. Though, I'm not sure population density quite means what you think it means - in Canada, at least, only one place behind Australia, the population density is very low, but the regions that actually contain people are about as dense as the US. Most of the population lives within a couple of hundred kilometers of the US border. To get out into the empty parts you need to go up north, where there are very few people, fewer roads, and very little in the way of infrastructure. A corporate executive type is going to stand out like a sore thumb among the people there, and is going to have a pretty tough time living without dealing with other people. To really disappear you want a teeming metropolis.
P.S. Can I also express my annoyance at your blog's commenting system? It offers a helpful box to enter username, email, url, comment and captcha, even showing you a nice preview, but when you fill it out and hit post it fails, telling you you should have logged in first. Why show the box if you're not logged in? Anyway, so you register and log in, find the post you were trying to comment on again, only to find out that even though you just logged in, giving it your username and email address, you still need to enter your username and email address every time you want to post a comment. Brilliant. I suppose it's useful in case I want to post a comment appearing to be from someone else...
8 November 2009 at 9:57 pm
@Anne,
Australia has a similar population spread to Canada. Most people live in big cities with very high population density. Sydney, for example, is somewhere north of 2,000 people per square km, though the whole of Australia averages to only 2.8/km2.
(Yes, this means we have a whole lot of very empty spaces!)
20 November 2009 at 11:10 pm
I'm not sure if any measure of density applies to the space between Mr Johnston's ears.