Thatcher's Favourite Fraudster | Asil Nadir’s Escape Pilot Speaks Out | 4

When Peter Dimond, the man who orchestrated Nadir's 1993 evasion from British justice, got in touch, Matt and Alice had to hear his side of the story. From the dramatic small plane escape to spending five years in Cyprus with Britain's most wanted fraudster, Dimond reveals what drove him to help Nadir and the true cost of his loyalty. Do you have a suggestion for a scandal you would like us to cover? Or perhaps you have a question you would like to ask our hosts? Email us at [email protected] See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Alice Levine?

  Audible subscribers can listen to all episodes of British Scandal ad-free right now. Join Audible today by downloading the Audible app.

• 0:15Matt Forde?

  From Wondery, I'm Matt Ford.

• 0:17Alice Levine?

  And I'm Alice Levine.

• 0:18Matt Forde?

  And this is British Scandal.

• 0:32Matt Forde?

  Alice, I've spent a bit of time this week reading through our British Scandal at wondery.com inbox.

• 0:38Alice Levine?

  Oh, dangerous. Okay, anything good, anything to report?

• 0:40Matt Forde?

  Well, I've got a few here. "Your podcast has made my days brighter and is a constant source of enjoyment for me." That's from Caitlin.

• 0:47Alice Levine?

  Excellent.

• 0:48Matt Forde?

  "Really like your programme. Love a bit of silliness." That's from Glynnis.

• 0:52Alice Levine?

  Correct.

• 0:53Matt Forde?

  "Your Australian accent sounds like a South African strangling a New Zealander. Have mercy." That's from Catherine.

• 0:59Alice Levine?

  No notes. I've always said that our listeners are people of great taste and people who speak the truth, and I will not change that stance now I've heard those messages.

• 1:07Matt Forde?

  And there's one more. Now, this one I think you're going to like. "I've just listened to your first part of Asil Nadir's Flight Out of the UK on May 4, 1993. I set up his escape from the UK and went with him, so I have all the intricate details of how and when it really happened. My name is Peter Diamond, the pilot."

• 1:26Alice Levine?

  No!

• 1:27Matt Forde?

  Yes! We were going to jump right into the next series, but how could we ignore an email like that? Peter Diamond is a man who's lived an incredibly colourful life. He's now 83 and he has a CV that would put both of ours to shame. He's had stints as a restaurateur, a rating driver and a pilot. He's sold cars and flown Spitfires. He's travelled the world. But there's one particular journey that we're here to talk about today. Peter helped Asil Nadir in his audacious escape from the law. He spent five years living in Nadir's five-star hotel in northern Cyprus before returning to the UK in 1998 and going to prison for his part in Nadir's escape. It's a wild story and you're about to hear it from the horse's mouth. Peter joins us next.

• 2:17Speaker 02

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• 2:46Speaker 03

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• 3:29Speaker 03

  The system may have given up on my mom, but I never will. Listen to My Mom's Murder wherever you get your podcasts. Audible subscribers can binge all 10 episodes early and ad-free right now. Join Audible in the Audible app or by subscribing on Apple Podcasts.

• 3:51Matt Forde?

  Peter, thank you so much for getting in touch with us. How did you meet Azul Nadir?

• 3:56Speaker 04

  I met Azul Nadir through my wife running a cabochon party in London. A cabochon was a jewelry thing, a bit like Tupperware. They went around in the 80s and 90s selling lovely jewelry to each other. And these parties would attract all sorts of people and they'd buy and so forth and so on. And Azul's wife, or should I say partner, I think, in London was a great friend of my wife. So I was up there watching the show, basically.

• 4:27Matt Forde?

  And what kind of person did he seem when you first met him?

• 4:30Speaker 04

  Well, he was, when I first met him, and I really mean this, the first time I ever saw him, he looked an old man with a lot of problems on a walking stick. But I realised later that was a little bit of a gimmick. He was being followed very closely by the SFO and various agencies and he had to make it look as if he was struggling with life. And he was actually, I mean, he was in a lot of trouble, but he did make it look worse than it was.

• 4:56Alice Levine?

  Did you hit it off straight away?

• 4:59Speaker 04

  Yes, yeah, I mean, Assel was a very shrewd businessman. I sort of had that similar concept, not in his style obviously. But we clicked on business and the way life is, yes, very quickly.

• 5:10Alice Levine?

  And were you kind of match made in the way, in the way that sometimes partners do, they say, oh, you know, my friend's partner is really good fun and so are you, let's get you together. Were you sort of put together?

• 5:21Speaker 04

  No, my wife, no, again, my wife was very blunt with me. She said, look, Assel is in a lot, I knew, I knew Assel, not personally, but I knew of his story. I'd watched the papers, I'd seen what was going on with the SFO and the bail and all those things. And she just said to me, he's in, he's in a very bad way. And if we, if we can't help, then he's going to go back into prison. They're going to take the bail away and put him back inside. And she said, can you help? I said, well, how can I help? She said, well, we want to get him out of the country. And I said, okay, that's what we'll do. So then we met at the Cavajon party, which was not a coincidence, obviously.

• 6:00Speaker 04

  And we discussed under the cherry tree, how soon we had to go and what we're going to do. And from there on, I started planning it from that day on.

• 6:11Matt Forde?

  And talk us through the process of that plan.

• 6:14Speaker 04

  Well, A, we had to get him out of London, get him down to Petersfield in Hampshire where I lived. And then on down to Compton Abus, which was the airfield that I used to fly from. So that's where we had to work out dates, times. He was going to be put back in jail, I think, within 10 days, 15 days back into, because his bail was running out. So they thought, in fact, he wasn't on bail at all. But they assumed that he was on bail and it was going to be upgraded to Crown Court.

• 6:43Alice Levine?

  You're saying all of this very matter of factly, Peter. Given that you'd only just met this guy, what on earth made you want to take part in a daring escape plan in a tiny plane in order to save him?

• 6:55Speaker 04

  I don't like British justice. The British justice system, and it's still going on, it'll carry on going on because it's a system nobody can change. And they just find people guilty when they feel like it. When they want to do something, they can do it. They break all the rules of the world. So it's time for me to break a rule.

• 7:11Matt Forde?

  But wasn't Asil also breaking rules?

• 7:16Speaker 04

  No, not really. All we did, all we did that was not correct was we left the country and we didn't come back. There is no rule that you have to have a passport to leave a country. If you decide to fly out of the country, they don't show you a passport to anybody. But if you go abroad to Spain, they don't actually show you a passport. I mean, in those days you didn't. Now, of course, since terrorism and since all this business, you are having to show passports. But in those days, you could fly out of an airfield like Compton Abbot, you didn't have to show a passport. The fact we didn't come back was what they, you know, what they got upset about.

• 7:49Matt Forde?

  Were you not scared, Peter? Because I get your opposition to British justice and the way that it's sometimes applied, but you were taking great risks with your own personal liberty and future in helping Asil. Is it that you're just less risk averse than the rest of us? Or was there a thrill to it?

• 8:07Speaker 04

  There was a reason to do it. The man was suffering very badly. A lot of people lost a lot of money over Polypek, forgetting that a lot of people also made a lot of money in 10 years before it happened. But nevertheless, this had caused a lot of problems for him, his family and people around him. And we wanted to get him out of the country because he was going to be put back in jail again. They were taking all his papers. He couldn't get a proper trial.

• 8:32Matt Forde?

  But weren't you worried about going to prison?

• 8:34Speaker 04

  It was a gamble, a risk. I mean, I fly for a living, that's a gamble. You know, I drive racing cars for a living, that's a gamble. So it goes on. I die, you know, you run out of air at 300 feet, you'll be dead. So there's a risk in everything you do in life. But for me, the risk was worth the effort for a family friend, as he was in those days.

• 8:58Alice Levine?

  It's an understatement to say that Asil must have been extremely grateful for your expertise and for your help. Other than a sense of justice, did you ever think that there was something in it for you? Any kind of reward? I mean, a lot of people would expect something in return.

• 9:17Speaker 04

  Yes, yes. The idea was that I would go down into the island and join him in a business venture. Probably my side would have been to set up the airline again. He had an airline before he was crashed down to the ground. He had an airline which ran holidaymakers from all over the world into Cyprus. And that airline was collapsed by the SFO or by the creditors. And the idea was to start that up again, and I would have been a part of that.

• 9:43Matt Forde?

  And was that offer serious and genuine? Or was he trying to manipulate you?

• 9:47Speaker 04

  Let me tell you something about Asil Nadir. It's what a lot of people are like. When they say it and on the day, they mean it. The next day, when they wake up, they've forgotten it. And that was Asil Nadir. Asil Nadir would make promises. He was called Mr. Promise on the island.

• 10:04Matt Forde?

  What was Asil's state of mind during the escape?

• 10:08Speaker 04

  I worried more about a helicopter standing in front of us than anything else. The only thing that could have stopped us in the drive and the whole run of it down to the airport, out of the airport, over Beachy Head, across to the Channel. The only thing that could have stopped us would have been a helicopter. And of course, they didn't know we were, that we had left. I mean, Assal had left a wonderful disguise back in his flat. He, his man, his, he always had a man that did for him. And he, what he did was he dressed his man up in his own clothes, a light jacket and a fedora hat. And he made him stand by the window every day. So when the guys across the road who were supposed to be keeping an eye on him, had no idea he'd gone. He went out through the roof, down on the next, the next door neighbor's roof into a car and down to me by nine o'clock

• 10:53Speaker 04

  in the morning. And they, they didn't know that Assal had left the flat until we got to Cyprus, when as soon as we landed, of course, the Turkish press and the Greek press were all over us like a rash.

• 11:04Matt Forde?

  Was Assal panicking? Was he calm? Wha- what was his demeanor?

• 11:09Speaker 04

  Well, if I say he had a cigarette in both hands, uh, yeah, we had one, one real fright. The only one that concerned me really was, we came out of Petersfield. I had a quite a powerful little car at that time, but you couldn't, you, you know, if you went too fast on, uh, on an early morning drive, you, you noticed. And we came down the hill in towards Winchester. And in front of me was a roundabout with a police car stood on it and a police motorcyclist talking to the driver. And there were no, there was no other traffic. And so we were coming towards them from about quarter of a mile, we could see them. And Assal went frantic. I mean, he did light up two cigarettes, literally, one in each hand. And he was really,

• 11:52Speaker 04

  really worried. And I said, look, Assal, don't panic. I said, you, we've just got to drive straight on as if we're normal people. He said, speed up, speed up. I said, no, no, no, no, that's the worst thing we can do. We're going to go past him. We're going to take our luck. And we did. And as we went past him, the motorcyclist pulled out behind us. And that did worry me, because I really thought that they had had a message to say, stop that car. So he stood behind us for about, he rode behind us for about two hundred, three hundred yards and I actually started to slow down a little bit to see if he'd go past me and he did. He went straight past and never saw him again.

• 12:27Alice Levine?

  And there was also an incident with a gun, wasn't there?

• 12:30Speaker 04

  What happened was he was, um, Assal suffered, I think, from a little bit of peeing problem. He, he used to, he wouldn't stop and have a pee every ten minutes and that was worry, a lot of that was worry. And so we stopped and he said, I've got to go and have a pee. I said, well, just make it quick because we've got to be on our way. And he said, ah, they won't catch me, I've got this in my hand. And he had a ladies handbag pistol. I don't know if you know what that is, but it's a very small gun that you can put in a handbag. And it's usually a one or two shot, it's preloaded. Um, and once you fired it, that's it, you, you can't, you know, you've got to reload it again. And I said, what the hell are you doing with that? He said, well, I don't want them to take me. I said, take you? I said, they'll shoot you dead. That's got to go. I said, you cannot, you cannot be found with that gun.

• 13:14Speaker 04

  That involves me as well, because I'm accessory to the fact. And I said, a gun in this day and age, and of course this was the age still of the IRA. And I said, you'll throw it in the hedge and leave it there. And as far as I know, it is still in that hedge. And I made the phone call from the car, very early mobile phone in a car. And they said, two's burning and two's ready. And they, I got there and the airplane was revving up by the car park. We just jumped out of the car, straight into an open door of the airplane and he started to fly off. I'd forget, a lot of people thought that I flew him physically in an airplane. I didn't, I flew with him. I arranged it all with somebody who flew a twin. I wasn't twin rated at that time.

• 13:57Speaker 04

  But I sat up front with him just to make sure that everybody was happy, you know, I was sort of keeping the pilot happy and keeping Assal Nadia happy. It was quite, that was probably the most strenuous part of the journey. And as we were flying across the channel, Assal said to me, where's England? Where's England? I said, behind us, Assal, stop worrying about it. He said, are we out of England yet? I said, yeah, we're out of jurisdiction. We are out of the jurisdiction of the British forces. If we land in the water now, we're in French water. So then then he looked out the window and he saw some oil, trailing very slightly out of one of the nacelles of the engine. And he said, what's that, what's that, what's that? You know, that was comedy. That was comedy. And then the guy who flew me out flew back to Canton Abbas. But he didn't know who he was carrying.

• 14:42Speaker 04

  All I said to him was, I've got a passenger and I want to go to France for the day. And just take us there and then you can fly home. No idea that it was Aslan Adir until the next morning. He was there having his breakfast and he saw his wife was ironing his shirt, ready to go into work. And as all the headlines came up, picture of Asil, all the usual blah that you get on the news in the morning. He saw the wife iron slowed down. And then she stopped ironing and put it on its back. And she said, did you have anything to do with that, Clive? And he just looked at her and said, yep.

• 15:17Matt Forde?

  Yep.

• 15:17Alice Levine?

  Thank goodness Clive took it so well. Did you worry about implicating somebody innocent who who maybe didn't want to get mixed up in that?

• 15:25Speaker 04

  Well, Clive was an extraordinarily good guy. One of my best friends, he was a good pilot. And I had not told him who he was flying. So he did not know it was Aslan Adir. And so when they questioned him and so forth, he told the truth. He said, I didn't know who the guy was. He didn't know the name of the guy and he wasn't paid. He did nothing illegal and that shows up with the fact he was never arrested. He was never charged or anything else.

• 15:49Alice Levine?

  Clean as a whistle. I'm sure you were constantly assessing Asil's behaviour. Did you ever think this was too hot? He's very famous, he's very nervous, he's very jumpy. I just can't go through with this. It's going to be, it's going to be too difficult.

• 16:03Speaker 04

  No, not at all. Great fun. I enjoyed it. It was, it was a challenge. I actually enjoyed doing the, doing the job. I didn't enjoy the repercussions thereafter. But that's, as I said before, that's part of the life. You know, you do these things, you have to take the repercussions after. Sometimes they're good, sometimes they're bad.

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• 17:48Matt Forde?

  He spent five years in northern Cyprus at Asil's Hotel. What was it like? Can you describe a typical day?

• 17:55Speaker 04

  Well, of course, I was his number-two man when I first arrived. Everywhere he went, I went. Because he was trying to say, "This is the people that helped us. This is an Englishman who came along, and they believe in us, and they believe in Cyprus." You've got to remember that he was, he could have been the king of Cyprus. He was that big. He was the only man in Cyprus that could have done that. He owned so much property, owned the hotel I lived in and many other hotels. He was, he was a king of Cyprus without a doubt. And I was his toy for about, I don't know, six months. I had a personal bodyguard armed all the time.

• 18:31Alice Levine?

  Were there essentially unlimited funds to, to, to kind of maintain that lifestyle? How did that work financially?

• 18:38Speaker 04

  Well, all hotels of that character have got probably five or 10 rooms, which are not on the books. They are for special guests, they're for all sorts of reasons that you might make up in your own mind. People that can stay in that hotel and never be known to have been there. I was in one of those rooms for a start, a very palatial room, I have to add. And of course, the, the food and the bar, which was just absorbed. I mean, I never got actually paid. I think, I think I got $200 a month.

• 19:07Alice Levine?

  And what about Asil's lifestyle?

• 19:10Speaker 04

  Well, his lifestyle was typical Asil. He carried on spending, you know, he, don't forget when I left, in my briefcase, I had $400 that he'd given me, and that was the money he left this country with, $400. When we got to Cyprus, he had assets of 30 million. And when I say assets, we're talking about hotels, factories, newspapers, a big one. But of course, you can't, you can't pay the gas bill by taking a brick out of an asset. You have to sell an asset to have money, which is what he did. He sold the hotel in the end for 10 million, adjusting the Jasmine Court. Palatial hotel, beautiful hotel, but he sold it to the mafia, the Turkish mafia. They turned it into gambling casino.

• 19:53Matt Forde?

  You must have missed your wife and children. How did they react to you being out there?

• 19:58Speaker 04

  Well, they did come out. That, that was all arranged, that they did come out and see me. But yeah, I missed them like hell, obviously. I mean, that was, that was the downside.

• 20:07Matt Forde?

  Was your wife ever saying to you, Peter, this has gone on long enough now, you need to come home?

• 20:11Speaker 04

  Well, no, she, she's a very, very wise lady, my, my, she's ex obviously now, ex-wife. She could see the situation that she had created. I mean, you know, I'd never told anybody this in, in the early days. She was her and her, Hazel's wife that got me involved. Uh, admittedly, I picked up the cudgel and went on with it, but nevertheless, she knew that the problem that we were in was caused by a family decision. For me, I mean, we talked about it. I said, you want me to do it or don't you? She said, yes, I do. I want him out and I want to help him. She had no idea of the repercussions.

• 20:46Matt Forde?

  So when you're dealing with someone like him, from your perspective, is it that you think, well, you know what? If he sticks to that promise, great, but if not, I'm still enjoying the ride.

• 20:57Speaker 04

  Well, that would be true if I'd been single, but I did have a wife and two children and a mortgage and all the usual things you do have at the age of fifty. And, uh, that was my bigger worry, that, that that wasn't getting paid. And in fact, that was the case. It wasn't being paid. My luck was that my wife, uh, family took her in. Uh, they owned a large farm and they was, they're quite well healed. And they looked after the situation. I have a son and daughter now who are better in some respects because they learnt life very early. Um, so in some ways it worked out okay, but on the day, yes, I was, my own concern was I've got to look after the family. And he promised to do that and he didn't.

• 21:35Alice Levine?

  That must have been an incredible personal strain.

• 21:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, but what could you do if you're on an island thousands of miles away and you know that you got the, we, I knew from reports from home that the SFO was standing on, on all my friends, the museum that I ran was being ransacked for money. Uh, people that I knew were being asked questions they didn't deserve to be asked. It was, it was hard on the friends, friends I had around me. Well, what could I do? They told my wife that if I came back, I would be given five years, uh, for taking a man out of the country whilst he was on bail. That was, that was the threat. So I couldn't come back to this country, get five years for nothing. Um, and I had to gamble that Hazel would come clean in the end, which he didn't unfortunately. But as far as, you know,

• 22:20Speaker 04

  Worrying about what would happen in the future, I was okay for about nine months over there and then the red lights were on and I realised that things weren't going according to plan.

• 22:30Alice Levine?

  In the years you spent with him, did he change from that polite, charming man that you first met?

• 22:36Speaker 04

  Well, it's a difference between if you meet someone for the first time, you use your charm and charisma to persuade them to do something that you want them to do, correct? That's charisma. Charisma is one of those things that people follow. But when you actually work for somebody who's got charisma and you see the other side of it, and the other side is that I'm doing this because I want something. And that was Aslan Adir. He put the charisma into life because he wanted something out of it. And he normally got something out of it. I watched him at work. I was a great watcher of people. I watched him work and I thought, you clever bugger, you know, you get everybody around your little finger. But I caught him on some of the moments when he wasn't doing the charisma and so forth, and he could be very, very harsh, very harsh.

• 23:20Alice Levine?

  What do you mean by very harsh?

• 23:22Speaker 04

  Well, he would turn all that off and he'd come down to be a hard businessman. That's how he earned a living. That's how he made his money. He was a businessman at the end of the day, but he would introduce business people and business into his life through his charisma. And people would follow it. I mean, they did. Look at the share price, went from sixpence to thirty-eight pounds in ten years.

• 23:42Alice Levine?

  And personally, did you feel like he treated you well for the time that you spent together?

• 23:47Speaker 04

  In the time that we were there, he never gave me a real problem, other than he never paid me. And I didn't go there to be paid, but I would have liked to have had a little bit more assets, you know. I realised eventually there was going to be no airline, there was going to be no, he was selling stuff off, not building it. He kept on saying, tomorrow we're going to start the next, you know, he was one of these men that was always looking at tomorrow. We'll start a new business, there'll be a new poly pack and blah, blah, blah, but we've got to get this done with first, I've got to get this court case out of the way, blah, blah, blah. And I realised, of course, that in the end, watching him and listening to him, that he was kidding himself. My fatality was that once I'd got him there, I'd done my job, there was nothing else I could do for him.

• 24:31Speaker 04

  Once you've done the job, you're dead. And that's what I found out, the hard way.

• 24:38Matt Forde?

  You eventually choose to leave, so how did you leave and why?

• 24:43Speaker 04

  Well, I left because I'd had enough and I wanted to go home. I wanted to see the kids. I wanted to get back to normal. I was fifty...

• 24:51Speaker 04

  I think I was fifty-five when I left and I realised that the best part of my life was disappearing and I'd had a successful business in the car game, car business, and also flying. I had a flying business for five years. And I was, I was never going to be able to pick all that up if I didn't get home and get started again. I wasn't going to get anything out of it, I realised that. But I still had to get over the problem with the police and I still had to, you know, start life again. My daughter was reasonably well grown up by then. She said, Dad, you know, I think you ought to come home. And I said, I think you're right. And that's how things work with me. I suddenly make my mind up and then work towards the final effort. And the final thing was that there was another guy out there, a pilot, and he said to me, look,

• 25:35Speaker 04

  Pete, if you want to go, he said, take my Range Rover and drive it back to Northern Ireland. And from Ireland you can talk to the lawyers and then come across when, when time is right. Which is what I did. So I drove the Range Rover right up to to France. But instead of going across the direct route to Northern Ireland from France, I decided to go through Dover and see my friends. I wanted to see my friends again. I wanted to see a bit of green grass. I wanted to just do the roads, do, do what I've always done all my life. And that's what I did.

• 26:06Alice Levine?

  When you got back to the UK, you were arrested. Can you tell us about that?

• 26:12Speaker 04

  Unfortunately for me, a person, I'm not going to tell you whose, knew that I was back in the country and told the police that I was going to be going across to Ireland and I was going to be going to Fishguard. So they put them, they put a complete guard on Fishguard and when I...

• 26:31Speaker 04

  When I eventually arrived at Fischgard, through devious places and met a lot of my good old friends and had some real hoolies on the way through, it took a week for me to get to Fischgard. I drove over the lip, a little lip of a hill to go into Fischgard Port. And there was the ticket office and I went to the ticket, it was only two cars in the car park and my big Range Rover stood out like there's no tomorrow. And so I went in and said, could I have a ticket? Yes, yes, yes, blah, blah, blah. Went back to the, to the vehicle and looked down the slope to where the gate was, where you have to go through to get onto the ferry. And I noticed a couple of policemen there, I thought, so I, of course, I've committed, I had to go. So down I went slowly, gently. And I suddenly realised there was a policeman behind me, there was a policeman in front

• 27:15Speaker 04

  of me, there was a policeman on the left hand side and a man at the window. So I let the window down, he said, could I see your passports? Yes, he said, you've been back here a few times, haven't you? I said, no, I've never been through here before. He said, no, not here in, in UK. I said, no, I've been in the UK for five years. He said, no, we know that Mr Diamond. And then, then the penny dropped, that they, they, they obviously knew who I was. And I saw him go back to the office and he came out with a complete armful of papers and god knows what else. And said, I'm arresting you for attempting to avert the course of justice, blah, blah, blah. Um, and that was, that was my freedom gone. I said, you don't have to handcuff me. I said, I'm not going to run. I've said, I've done enough running.

• 27:58Speaker 04

  And he said, yeah, you've had a good time though, haven't you? They were very nice, actually, I'm going to say, they were, they were quite pleasant. I had no trouble with them at all. I understood what they were doing, I knew I'd have to go through the process, there was no point in bucking the system.

• 28:11Matt Forde?

  Did you think that Asil was going to send any help in the form of lawyers or legal fees?

• 28:16Speaker 04

  I did initially, I thought he might, no, I didn't know, I thought, well, when I left Asil Nadia, the last day before I went on the ferry to leave Cyprus, I actually went to Asil with a crowd of others, it was New Year's Day. And I said to him, goodbye Asil. And he never picked it up. I thought he would have done, but he didn't. And by the time he did, I was gone.

• 28:39Alice Levine?

  It must have been terrifying to go to jail. Can you tell us about what that experience was like?

• 28:45Speaker 04

  Well, it's not terrifying, it's, it's another big step in life, but it's not terrifying. I mean. It's only a building with a lot of people in it and boats walking around with uniforms on. It's, you know, and I hadn't killed anyone, murdered anybody or stolen a million pounds.

• 29:00Alice Levine?

  But you were housed with people who probably had.

• 29:03Speaker 04

  I certainly was. I made a great friend of a murderer who lived from Australia.

• 29:08Alice Levine?

  In prison, did you get into trouble? Was it at times ever hairy?

• 29:14Speaker 04

  Not at all. I had no trouble whatsoever. When I arrived there, I had done the government over. Let's not kid ourselves. I escaped, I got a man to escape from custody, from arraignment, shall we call it, one of the most important men in the country at that time. He was the most wanted man at that time. And I was seen to be the bloke that made it all possible. So that all the guys in prison said, well done mate, that was terrific. Tell us all about it. I had no trouble whatsoever in prison. In fact, the screws, I'll tell you a funny story if you've got the moment. When I first walked in there, they said, right, what's your name? I said, Peter Diamond. He said, okay, now what are you in for? I

• 29:55Speaker 04

  said, I'm here because I attempted to pervert the course of justice. He said, I can't write all that on a bloody board. He said, I put up pervert. And he did. He put pervert up on the board, which I thought was extremely funny at the time. I said, you can't do that, Gov. You'll let me dead by the end of the day. He said, no, all right, we'll take that off. But that was the sort of attitude that I had when I went in there. And I really didn't run into any trouble. I mean, I didn't have to. I was on a very light charge. I mean, to put it crudely, I will tell you what I'm called in prison, a shit and a shave. Because that's what they call short term prisoners. You're in there for a quick one and back out again. And they knew that I was only in for two years and I was going to go up for appeal. So they all treated me as a bit of a lad, you know, they call

• 30:40Speaker 04

  me captain. Everybody called me captain. I never quite understood why, but they did.

• 30:45Matt Forde?

  You mentioned your appeal there. You had your conviction quashed after a year. Tell us about your appeal.

• 30:50Speaker 04

  They had finally, after many court cases, said that Nasal Deir was not on bail when he left the UK. That was absolute ruling. So we went to appeal. And everybody knew that I was going to get out. I mean, it was quite strange. This was just before Christmas. It was December the 15th. And they said, oh, hum, hum, hum. The senior judge of the appeal court was in fact the man who tried to get the House of Lords to overturn the situation two years before. And I said, you know that that the dear wasn't on bail. I said, I must listen to my learned friends, blah, blah, blah. Will any of you bail over Christmas while we discuss this matter? And I said, I don't want you bail. He said, I beg your pardon, Mr.

• 31:35Speaker 04

  I said, I don't want your bail. I said, you bailed me last time when I was out and I had nothing but police bothering me all the time, attending police station at one o'clock every day. And I said, I don't want it. I'll stay in prison while you make your mind up and you should know what your decision's going to be. And so I stayed in jail over Christmas. I went back on January the 15th to walk free.

• 31:55Alice Levine?

  With the benefit of hindsight, if you could go back to 1993, knowing what you know now, would you still help Asil Nadir?

• 32:03Speaker 04

  The two answers about the answer to first is yes, I would have done, but I wouldn't because I have two kids and I'm married. That's where I made my mistake. The children were more important. I've seen them grow up. I mean, I miss my son between the age of nine and 14. Now, those were the most important years of his life and I should have been there. So that's.

• 32:31Speaker 04

  The man, the man wasn't worth it. I, you know, I've got friends in my life who are worth a lot more than Asil Nadir. He wasn't the man I thought he was. He was a total Mr. Promise.

• 32:44Matt Forde?

  And finally, Asil Nadir died recently. Where were you when you heard the news and how did you feel?

• 32:51Speaker 04

  I think I was in the bathroom. I don't know. I don't know. You know, you ask me a question, I can't even know. I mean, it meant absolutely nothing to me. I knew he'd die because he was exactly the same age as me and I'm 83 and he was 83. But he was a very unfit man in real terms. He was a slob. He used to eat, overeat, oversmoke, sat down all the time, never took exercise. You know, he was, he was a great disappointment. Let's put it that way.

• 33:22Matt Forde?

  Peter, thank you so much for joining us and sharing your incredible personal experience with Asil Nadir.

• 33:33Matt Forde?

  Wasn't that incredible? Huge thanks to Peter Diamond for giving us the inside scoop on a wild story. And of course, that now means there's an open invitation. So if you've been mentioned on a series of British Scandal and would like to be interviewed about it, get in touch.

• 33:48Alice Levine?

  Yeah, please, more of that. [email protected]. And don't forget, we are starting an equally crazy story for you next time. No planes, no years in exile, no wigs and no decoy bodyguards, which makes me sad. But we have saucy Polaroids, our first metal penis, I think, since series one, a divorce trial that will make your toes curl and your blood boil, Matt.

• 34:09Matt Forde?

  Until that final fact, I thought you were talking about the British Scandal Christmas party.

• 34:14Alice Levine?

  We promised we would never tell. Sadly not, that will come up in series to come, I'm sure. This series is in fact The Dirty Duchess. I will tell you more next week, I can't wait.

• 34:38Speaker 07

  Journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia spent her life exposing powerful people. Then, in 2017, she was killed in a car bombing. I'm Stephen Gray, and for the past nine years, I've been trying to find out who wanted her dead. That search took me to Malta through secret companies, organised crime, and eventually to one of the island's richest and most powerful men. Now, after years of waiting, his trial has finally happened. But when the verdict came in, the case took a turn that almost no one had expected. In a brand new update to the multi-award winning podcast, Who Killed Daphne?, I'm returning to Malta to find out how we got there and where the search for the truth goes next. Listen to the new episode of Who Killed Daphne? wherever you get your podcasts.

• 35:23Speaker 07

  And you can hear the full six-part investigation from the beginning, ad-free with Audible. Join Audible today by downloading the Audible app and by subscribing on Apple Podcasts.

• 35:37Speaker 06

  Hi, I'm Kenya Barris. And I'm Malcolm Gladwell. We're back for season two of our Audible original podcast, The Unusual Suspects. We're bringing you fresh, new conversations from guests like Anderson Paak. David Zedars, Ryan Howard, Richo, Amy Sheld, and many more. Sign up for a free trial to Audible to listen to season two in the Audible app or by subscribing on Apple Podcasts.

• 36:02Matt Forde?

  From Wondery and Samistat Audio, this is the fourth and final episode in our series Thatcher's Favorite Fraud Stuff. British Scandal is hosted by me, Matt Ford.

• 36:11Alice Levine?

  And me, Alice Levine.

• 36:13Matt Forde?

  For Samistat, our producer is Redzi Bernard. Our assistant producer is Louise Mason. Our senior producers are Joe Sykes and Dasha Lisitsina. Our engineer is Jai Williams. For Wondery, our senior producer is Theodora LaLudis and our senior managing producer is Rachel Sibley. Executive producers for Wondery are Estelle Doyle, Chris Bourne, and Marshall Louie.

• 36:49Speaker 07

  There are books that change how you see the world, and there are books that change how you see yourself. In a new podcast series, A Great Book with Barack Obama, President Obama sits down with a series of surprising and sharp guests to explore six books that have shaped his life and perspective on the world. From Song of Solomon and The Fire Next Time, to All the Pretty Horses and Gilead, the president is joined by guests like Tom Hanks and Tanahasi Coats to reflect on how these timeless stories shaped his thinking on everything from fatherhood to leadership, and discover together what they tell us about the world we live in and the world we want to create. Audible subscribers can listen

• 37:34Speaker 07

  to all episodes of A Great Book with Barack Obama ad-free right now, plus access each audiobook discussed in the series. Download the Audible app today.

• 37:49Speaker 07

  For decades, two legendary brands fought for the hearts

• 37:51Matt Forde?

  American bikers, Indian Motorcycle and Harley-Davidson. The battle looked a lot like Coke versus Pepsi or Ford versus Chevy, but tastes changed and Indian didn't adapt fast enough. The icon all but died. Then came the con men, the dreamers, a string of spectacular failures that kept Indian in the grave, until one company finally got it right. This is the story of an improbable revival and the reignition of an old rivalry. Hey, I'm David Brown, the host of the podcast Business Wars, and every season we bring you the true stories behind the companies that shape our world. Indian's new owners are going all in, but an existential crisis looms. Can Indian and Harley recruit enough younger riders to survive? Make sure to follow Business Wars wherever you get your podcasts.

• 38:35Matt Forde?

  Audible subscribers can binge all episodes of Business Wars early and ad-free right now. Join Audible in the Audible app or by subscribing on Apple Podcasts.