In the early eighties, before Enron and Worldcom, before financial sector sleaze and mismanagement destroyed whole economies, people were more trusting of business – until the arrival of the Carrian Group, which perpetrated the largest fraud of its time. Ian Robinson, former liquidator of group division Carrian Investments, writes in his self-published The Joker’s Downfall that the Carrian case shocked nearly everyone. Opening the story with the gruesome July 1983 discovery of Malaysian banker Ibrahim Jalil’s body in a New Territories banana plantation, the author devotes most of the book’s first half to the three dramatic years starting in 1980 when Carrian, an unknown pest control operator, became one of the largest listed firms in Hong Kong through a rapid series of seemingly ballsy property acquisitions. However, like the packs of Carrian playing cards and hollow Carrian embossed watches Robinson later found in the firm’s office, the company was without foundations and soon collapsed in a tangled web of fraudulent deals and ruined reputations. An aura of trust and respectability surrounded Carrian The main player is the gregarious George Tan, the “Joker” in the title. As Carrian’s then managing director, now living in semi-retirement in Clearwater Bay, Tan surrounded himself with credible faces like Rodney Bell and John Marshall, both formerly of Price Waterhouse (as it was then known), hired Price Waterhouse and law firm Deacons as advisers, and banked with nearly everyone. An aura of trust and respectability surrounded Carrian as a result, and kept the public hoodwinked, writes Robinson, who spent 11 years helping to unwind HK$7 billion in mostly unsecured loans (about HK$17 billion in today’s money). In Hong Kong’s insular society, the revelations that prominent bankers and advisers took bribes or turned the other cheek in return for fat consulting fees sent shock waves through the community. And while many ended up behind bars, others escaped justice. Each of these cases is discussed at some length in the book and while holiday readers will have no trouble following Robinson’s jargon-free writing as he breezes through the saga, at only 290 pages of text and a further 70 pages of appendices, they will come away wanting more. The roles that leading Malaysian politicians, including then prime minister Mahathir Mohamad, allegedly played in bankrolling the firm via Bank Bumiputra are briefly touched on, but Robinson, like writers before him, sadly cannot offer any definitive answer on their involvement or on the shadowy forces behind Jalil’s death. Likewise for the tragic suicide/murder of Deacons senior partner John Wimbush and the inexplicable dismissal of Tan’s first trial by Justice Dennis Barker, followed shortly after by Barker’s death in a car crash. Robinson believes that Barker wanted a face-saving way out after he lost track of the case and the thousands of documents submitted. Where Robinson stands out is in the little vignettes of the story’s key personalities that bring the story alive, and in the money-chasing trail, detailed in the second half, that led him around the world to ultimately return 44 cents on the dollar to Carrian Investments’ creditors. Who knew that the US-based in-house counsel at Arthur Young, Robinson’s then employer, unsuccessfully lobbied against suing Carrian auditors Price Waterhouse for HK$2 billion on the grounds that a loss for Price Waterhouse would push up global insurance premiums for all accountancy firms including his own? As the creditors’ representative, Robinson stood his ground against his colleague and Price Waterhouse later agreed to settle for an undisclosed amount. For a younger generation of readers the tale now pales against recent scandals, but at the time it heralded a new era in corporate sleaze, and rang the death knell for one of naïve innocence. The Joker’s Downfall by Ian Robinson. Self published. In bookstores around town.
