Pod Insights ABC Rewind 02 | Skase | Building a Mirage About this episode In the 1980s, Christopher and Pixie Skase are headline news, right on top of the billionaire food chain. Australia can’t get enough of them. Skase builds the luxury Mirage resorts in Queensland and throws epic, over-the-top, star-studded parties. Pixie flies in flowers, chefs and dresses on their private jet. It’s a wild ride. But if something seems too good to be true it quite possibly is.
Transcript 5,403 words · 17 speakers
0:02 Speaker 00 It's 1969 and a young man stands on a vast, empty beach in far north Queensland. The Great Barrier Reef behind him, rainforest in front. He's been driving around Australia in a beat-up Ford Falcon. He's seen many beautiful places. But when he gets here, here being Four Mile Beach in Port Douglas, he has a vision.
0:27 Speaker 01 He came across these beautiful beachfronts and tucked away in the back of his mind, this would be a good place to build a resort one day.
0:34 Speaker 02 It was a sleepy little fishing village. Really no one came here.
0:39 Speaker 03 The story goes that he was, say, mesmerised by the beauty of it and he literally drew lines in the sand of the sort of tourism complex that he wanted.
0:49 Speaker 02 The only accommodation in Port Douglas then was the Port Douglas Motel and the Coconut Grove Motel and a couple of caravan parks. It was very isolated. There was one bumpy track up from Cairns.
1:03 Speaker 03 And I guess the story shows you that he was a visionary.
1:08 Speaker 00 This visionary young man is 20-year-old Chris Skase. He hasn't quite morphed into the Christopher who'll go on to become a business tycoon. He's just spent a year working at investment firm JB Weir and now he's broadening his horizons and driving around the country thinking about his next move.
1:29 Speaker 04 Chris said, "Look, we're gonna buy this, tend to this land on Four Mile Beach." So I went down there and I walked on it and I remember ringing him back and said, "What the hell do you wanna buy this place for? It's a hell of a long way away and the water's dirty and the beach is mud."
1:46 Speaker 02 And the locals all said, "Oh no, no, no, you can't build anything there. It's a milliluca swamp, there's lovely rare trees there, there's beautiful little plants, there's the occasional lake there when the tide comes in, so you can't build anything there."
2:00 Speaker 04 We had a photographer sent up to Port Douglas to take pictures of this wonderful four-mile beach.
2:07 Speaker 04 And we were sitting in Collin Street and looking at these pictures of mud and palm trees. The photographs didn't work.
2:14 Speaker 00 So the photographer's sent to Hawaii to take pictures of its white sandy beaches instead. And it's those photos that end up being used to woo investors. Right from the start, the Port Douglas Mirage Resort is just that, a mirage.
2:34 Speaker 00 I'm Mark Humphries and this is Skase: Fall of a Tycoon.
2:41 Speaker 00 Last time on episode one, Skase evolved from Chris to the more serious, more substantial Christopher. When he was starting out, he was geekish. He wanted to be a entrepreneur. He wanted to be a corporate raider. He buys the company that'll make him rich and famous, Quintex. And he marries the glamorous Pixie.
3:02 Speaker 04 Gosh, we knew of Pixie in Melbourne because it was the 80s. You know, the higher the hair, the closer to God. I used to call Christopher God because he was very clever at motivating people to do things that he wanted done. He came with that cowboy energy.
3:17 Speaker 00 Christopher the entrepreneur has arrived and his star begins to rise.
3:24 Speaker 00 This is episode two, Building a Mirage.
3:33 Speaker 00 Skase has never forgotten that day on the beach in Port Douglas. And in 1984, he decides it's time to move to Queensland and start building those luxury resorts of his dreams. He's telling everyone he wants to get away from Melbourne's stuffy business environment. That's one way to put it. Another is to say he's being investigated by Victoria's corporate regulator. It's claiming gross criminal abuse of the corporate system in his management of Hardy Brothers Jewelers and is trying to pin charges on him. Skase is blaming it on tall poppy syndrome. So he packs up and moves to a booming Queensland with his wife Pixie. Historian Quentin Beresford.
4:16 Speaker 03 He saw that the tourism and leisure market was changing, that there was now this wealthy class of people who had money and who had leisure time. He understood that the Japanese tourism market was opening up and he realised that you could grease the palm of these Queensland politicians at the time.
4:37 Speaker 05 People in Victoria viewed Western Australia and Queensland as glamorous but financially wild places and reeked of outback uncertainty and seemed to attract robber barons.
4:54 Speaker 00 Moving to Brisbane is a strategic move for Skase, a very calculated one. But Pixie, well, she's not so sure.
5:02 Speaker 03 Pixie was totally horrified at the idea of coming to Queensland from Melbourne. She thought she was coming to the boondocks.
5:10 Speaker 00 But Pixie holds her nose and vows to bring a bit of style to Queensland. Well, Pixie's style. There are many words to describe her style. Restraint is not one of them. Pixie works with her personal designer to zhuzh up the new Quintex headquarters in Brisbane's CBD. Versace on steroids, I think, was one description of what it looked like. Post-modernist Roman bathhouse is another. Ming Dynasty panels, a waterfall in the lobby, a staircase made from Brazilian blue marble. Quintex's new HQ is next level. Premium, opulent, blue marble everywhere is what it looked like.
5:52 Speaker 00 Everywhere, including in the corporate jet recently purchased from the King of Jordan.
5:58 Speaker 04 But you don't put marble in jet planes. It looks good, but there's a certain thing with taking... So we had to sort of remove the marble in the floor of the plane because, you know, this was not going to take off.
6:10 Speaker 00 That's the thing with interior designers, they're rarely experts in aerodynamics.
6:17 Speaker 00 And the lux isn't limited to the Quintex officers and the private jet. Christopher and Pixie buy the most expensive real estate in Brisbane. Two neighbouring historic Queenslanders, high on Hamilton Hill. They publicly promise conservationists they won't knock them down, but they quickly break that promise and bulldoze them, spending millions building a mansion. Bromley. Bromley has a lift, a gym, a luxury cinema, a tennis court and a pool room made from blue... Well, I think you can guess. Life-sized Laurel and Hardy mannequins guard the double front doors. Who says rich people aren't just like us? And the pièce de résistance,
6:58 Speaker 00 a marble statue of Julius Caesar imported from Italy and said to be 2,000 years old. Brisbane's never seen anything like Bromley.
7:09 Speaker 03 So it was gargantuan. And Bromley became famous for its champagne-flowing parties. One party, he flew 150 people up from Melbourne and greeting them at the airport were 27 white limousines and the champagne flowed.
7:26 Speaker 00 And legend has it, there's a glass dome in Skyes's home office holding a million dollars in $100 bills. Shredded, an homage to his first mill. Again, very relatable. The excess might sound sickening, but in the 80s, it's lapped up.
7:45 Speaker 06 They were headline news all of the time and they were very symbolic of 1980s Australia, the playground of the billionaires. And their lives were like an episode of Days of Our Lives. We couldn't get enough of them.
7:58 Speaker 00 As the Skyes's wealth soars, their parties become next level. They're full of famous and influential people. Singer John Farnham, Hollywood actor George Hamilton, the only man with a tan stronger than Skyes, and Channel 7 stars Denise Drysdale and Darren Hinch. But Darren sees another side of Skyes.
8:20 Speaker 07 Look, even though his parties were huge and grandiose, he wasn't exactly a great party goer. He was at times fairly shy and I've sat at tables with Christopher and he wouldn't have said 10 words in half an hour. He just had an aura about him, an aura of success.
8:43 Speaker 00 And, says Quentin Beresford, a touch of the Jay Gatsby's as well.
8:49 Speaker 03 F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel, of course, The Great Gatsby, created this fascinating character, you know, of a wealthy man who loves to throw these fantastic lavish society parties. You know, he'd be in a room somewhere in the mansion without actually attending his parties. And so when I thought about that side of him, and here he is, Skyes the Magnificent, at all these fantastic, nation drawing parties, you just realise that Skyes is playing a role. He's an actor. He's an actor in his own wealth acquisition drama. Because he's not comfortable at them, you can tell.
9:25 Speaker 00 And maybe that's because, behind the glamour of the parties, it's all about business. Even at his legendary Christmas parties, the management team, like Stephen Borzeki, would have to work the room.
9:36 Speaker 04 Each of us would get a table to look after, encourage to either buy apartments in the Gold Coast, or whatever we were needing to sell, or invest, or whatever. So, they were business transactions. He never did anything that wasn't business. If you want to talk about the footy, or your latest girlfriend, or your latest car, he'd just switch off and go and find the next, I won't say victim, but the next candidate for some possible deal.
10:04 Speaker 00 Financial status? By the end of 1985, Quintex is worth $208 million. Skyes has doubled its worth in a year.
10:15 Speaker 00 Now, remember that plot of land on the beach in Port Douglas that Skyes spotted way back in 1969? The one where he drew a mud map in the sand of his fantasy resort? Well, now investment manager Stephen Borzeki has to find a way to make that fantasy a reality.
10:31 Speaker 04 We debated what name to call this resort, and the name Mirage came up, which of course... I coughed in my Scotch again and said you cannot have a prospectus with the name Mirage on it because people would look at you a bit dubiously.
10:46 Speaker 00 But first, Skyes has to acquire the land, both on the Gold Coast and in Port Douglas. There are a few, shall we say, hurdles to get over before Skyes can get development approval. The Port Douglas site is owned by the state government and there's some stiff competition for it from local developers. Skyes is going to have to smooth the way. But it is 1980s Queensland and luckily for him, the long-serving National Party premier is Sir Joe Bielke-Petersen. Joe's a bit of a colourful character, which is another way of saying, Joe's a bit dodgy.
11:23 Speaker 08 Politics is a pretty, well, dirty game. I've said that many times. I know it backwards.
11:29 Speaker 00 Do you play dirty as well?
11:30 Speaker 08 No, I don't.
11:30 Speaker 00 Well, Joe, you kinda did. Loved by some, loathed by many, and famous for not making a lot of sense.
11:39 Speaker 08 But the objection I have to the Liberal Party today is all the trendies out there. And if you've got a trendy strung around your neck, you've got a millstone that's pretty hard to survive with.
11:49 Speaker 03 Well, Joe infamously ran among the most corrupt governments in Australia and was very pro-development. And so I think Skyes could see the opportunities of both things going on. North Queensland at the time was remote, not a lot of development going up there. You know, why wouldn't the government be keen? So I wouldn't overplay the inference of favouritism, but I guess you're looking at the potential of Skyes prepared to grease the palm if that was what was required.
12:23 Speaker 00 Let's just say donations to the National Party are highly recommended. Historian Quentin Beresford.
12:30 Speaker 03 The allegation is, we don't have firm confirmation of this, that Skyes paid favours to certain Queensland individuals to get that land. But an opportunity for, you know, a kind of shameless business operator like Skyes who didn't mind sort of walking on the dark side of the business world. I think he donated very heavily to the Bielke-Petersen government.
12:56 Speaker 03 Two hundred thousand.
12:57 Speaker 00 Gaozus. Quintex's investment manager, Stephen Borzeki, is in the room with Skyes, trying to get the deal over the line, when Sir Joe says...
13:05 Speaker 04 I don't care what you blokes do, as long as you bring your money in Queensland. Did he bend some rules? Maybe he did, maybe he didn't, but he certainly went well out of his way to make Queensland what it is today.
13:18 Speaker 03 Bealke Peterson, some of your listeners won't recall just how notorious he was, but he's very verbally challenged, you know, he's tripped over his diction all the time. And after the $200,000 donation was given, Bealke Peterson publicly thanked his good friend, Christopher Skates.
13:36 Speaker 00 Skyes acquires that extremely valuable Port Douglas land in exchange for Quintex's shares. He gets all the approvals he needs, and he puts his skates on.
13:48 Speaker 09 While the development will be a boon for local businesses, there's strong opposition over the possible destruction of mangroves and the impact an international resort would have on the Port Douglas lifestyle.
13:58 Speaker 00 There's a few pesky environmental issues that have to be dealt with before construction can start. Some environmentally delicate sand dunes blocking ocean views on the Gold Coast site. Fortunately for Skyes, these sand dunes mysteriously disappear one night, and the Mirage resorts are on their way.
14:20 Speaker 00 Some guys have all the luck.
14:24 Speaker 00 Financial status: age 38, $325 million. 1986 has been a big year. Skyes has bought a couple of TV stations in the US, but closer to home, he's making the classic rich man move and buying a sports team.
14:47 Speaker 00 Christopher financially backs a new footy team to play in the precursor of the AFL, the VFL. Aussie rules are dirty words in rugby league-obsessed Queensland, so it's a gutsy move.
15:02 Speaker 00 Skyes insists the club is based on the Gold Coast, not Brisbane. After all, his new Gold Coast Mirage Resort is close to opening and wealthy footy supporters will need somewhere to stay, and so will his hot new recruit.
15:16 Speaker 10 Warwick Richard Kappa, here for your satisfaction.
15:19 Speaker 00 Here we go. Skyes reckons the Bears need a bit of star power, a bit of razzmatazz to gain supporters. So he woo's the man with the most famous mullet in the country, Sydney Swans legend Warwick Kappa, with an unprecedented salary.
15:35 Speaker 10 Well, he was a friend of mine because he paid me the most cash because I was the best player. 1.9, thank you, that's like 10 mil today.
15:43 Speaker 00 When Kappa takes his legendary blonde mullet and extremely tight shorts to the Brisbane Bears, he becomes the highest paid player in the league and he's pretty happy with his new mate, Christopher Skyes.
15:54 Speaker 10 Oh, entrepreneurial. I can't spell that, but I know how to say it. Unassuming, but nice, a bit like myself, very charming, handsome. And we had nice wives, me and Joanne Kappa back then.
16:09 Speaker 00 And just if you thought the money wasn't ridiculous enough, Skyes throws a men's clothing store into the Kappa deal.
16:16 Speaker 10 Lom, Lom, I'm not a Lom clothing, me and him. I didn't need shirt for $700. Sold one shirt a day, but jeez, that was a nice three years. And then we picked her up at her hairdressing right next door. She was nice, yeah, a bit like myself, it's a rough diamond. Used to get free mullets.
16:34 Speaker 00 Free mullets and a year's accommodation at the brand new Sheraton Mirage. Kappa is living the Australian dream.
16:41 Speaker 10 He said, "You say that Sheraton long as you want, so I stayed there, one and a half years." Nice I was, yeah, and $3,000 a night meal, yeah. Got my own massage girl and it was showtime razzmatazz football back then. I was his golden hair boy there.
16:59 Speaker 00 And just in time for the Brisbane Bears' first season, in late 1987, Skyes' dream development finally comes true. The luxurious Mirage Resorts in Port Douglas and on the Gold Coast open their doors. Pixie and Christopher invite journalists and influential stakeholders on a special trip. They call it the Too Good To Be True Tour. Yes, seriously.
17:26 Speaker 11 My name is John Beveridge and I worked as a journalist on the Sun News pictorial. And during the Skyes era, I was largely in the business section.
17:36 Speaker 00 John doesn't know quite what to expect of the tour, but when he boards the plane, he finds...
17:43 Speaker 11 These Too Good To Be True signs on the seatbacks. So it was like we were this little cheer squad for the Mirage Resorts. First stop was the Gold Coast. I like to describe it as being like peak 1980s because it was just over the top opulence. They had big statues of noble savage type things and it's quite frowned upon now, but it's like a black person with a spear sort of standing there with a light on their head. Slightly garish, there was a lot of gold taps, a lot of marble, quite lavish.
18:18 Speaker 00 And after a few nights at the Gold Coast Mirage, it's back on the plane for the two and a half hour flight north to Cairns.
18:24 Speaker 11 At the time, Port Douglas was seen as a bit of a backwater. It wasn't really known as a resort town. And there was a lot of speculation about how we're getting there because we'd heard that there was going to be this hovercraft. And sure enough, we got off the plane and while everyone else had to sort of drive around the bay to get to Port Douglas from Cairns Airport, we just went straight across on the hovercraft.
18:48 Speaker 00 Think White Lotus, a greeting party on the beach, a welcome cocktail.
18:54 Speaker 11 The Mirage Resort in Port Douglas is quite spectacular and it's surrounded by artificial lagoons. They filtered the water and everything because a lot of the year you can't swim at the beach there because of the jellyfish.
19:08 Speaker 00 Yes, Christopher Skyes wouldn't want you to get stung. Well, at least not by a jellyfish. It's easy to forget how groundbreaking Skase's Mirage Resort was. There's two hectares of these artificial lagoons with constructed white sand beaches, a championship golf course, 100 hectares of landscaped tropical gardens. This was unheard of in Australia. And then, there are the famous palm trees. Local historian Pam Burden is pretty sure they're Pixie's idea.
19:39 Speaker 02 She hated all the little ticky tacky houses that were built along the main road, so they built a new main road into Port Douglas. And Pixie decided that she wanted it lined with palm trees. So Christopher found that there was an oil palm plantation up in the Daintree, so he offered a million dollars to bring two plantations of oil palms down to Port Douglas and plant them.
20:03 Speaker 00 1,400 of them flown in by helicopter, one by one. What? You've never seen a palm tree take a helicopter ride?
20:13 Speaker 02 It attracted a lot of film stars because they don't get bothered. The locals are laid back enough to just go, "Oh, hello, here's Sean Penn again", or "Hello, Glenn Close".
20:22 Speaker 00 Hello, Pam. Love it or hate it, the Mirage is world class and it's put Port Douglas on the map. And even now, you'll still find sprinklings of pixie dust around town.
20:34 Speaker 02 The theme was pink. There were pink spa baths, corner spa baths, and she hated them and ordered them all to be taken out immediately, so they all ended up on the tip. Well, if you look around apartments of a certain age in Port Douglas, a lot of them have a pink spa bath in the corner now.
20:52 Speaker 00 And if you look hard enough, there are sprinklings of that bloody blue marble, too.
21:03 Speaker 00 Meanwhile, on the Too Good To Be True tour, and yes, this is the original ad for the resorts, Christopher and Pixie are bamboozling the journos with the wonders of the Mirage Hotels, handing out all kinds of merch.
21:17 Speaker 11 There was not a lot of scepticism from the journalistic core there because everyone was pretty excited about things. There were a couple of people who were, you know, a bit cautious about his approach, but by and large, it was hard not to get sort of sucked into this Christopher Skase dream and vision that he's casting of this resort that are going to... Span the globe, they're gonna be everywhere, you know, and he's gonna be running them all.
21:44 Speaker 00 But, under the surface, there's a quiver of doubt, a niggel. For all Skase's achievements and signs of success, questions are being, well, if not asked, at least thought. Is it all too good to be true?
22:09 Speaker 00 Turns out, there is someone who smells a rat. One of Skase's old friends from his journalism days, journalist Trevor Sykes, is travelling with John Beveridge. And while most of the entourage is drinking the Kool-Aid, John says Trevor is the only one asking questions.
22:27 Speaker 11 He spent the trip reading the balance sheet. He had the annual report out. So while the rest of us were babbling at the headrests, he was delving into the financial bowels, if I can put it that way, of Quintex. And trying to find out where the money was coming from and where it was going. And asking a lot of very pointed questions. And I think he was getting a bit of close attention from some of the executives too, to try and put him to right.
22:50 Speaker 00 Not to worry though, Skase is also selling hundreds of luxury apartments at the resorts for a quick cash injection to offset the loans he's taken out to build them. And, they're selling like hotcakes. Financial status: early 1987, $1.9 billion. But, there are murmurings about Skase's debt load. Because here's the thing you have to understand about Christopher Skase and his Quintex empire. Quintex is a house of cards. Each card being a debt, and holding up another part of the house which is also in debt. Stefan Bezecchi is sitting at the table.
23:30 Speaker 04 What we were doing, and I've got to be a bit careful here because I was not the accountant, and I wasn't across it, and other companies were doing the same thing. But basically the same asset, you could say, was mortgaged more than once.
23:45 Speaker 00 The whole empire was built on debt.
23:48 Speaker 03 Built on debt. I mean, the debt is really coming from institutional investors, but mums and dads. And the whole image that he and Pixie created of this extravagant success hid the deep flaws. They're always there in the company because it was built on escalating debt.
24:11 Speaker 00 It's somewhat finicky to explain all of Skase's financial machinations, but suffice to say, it's all a bit shady and a bit tenuous. Borrowing against assets further down the food chain is not ideal. But in the 1980s...
24:26 Speaker 03 Skase, Bond, everyone, there was a whole bevy of people out there who were borrowing like crazy.
24:34 Speaker 00 It seems like if the entrepreneurs ask, the banks give. And later, there'll be many, many questions asked about this lack of regulatory control on bank lending. In just a few years, some of these banks will go under, losing billions. Imagine that, banks losing money. But for now, Skase is living on the edge. And inside Quintex, Assistant Treasurer Craig Pratt is, well, not quite wetting the bed, but certainly thinking about buying a mattress protector.
25:07 Speaker 12 Did I ever feel there was too much debt? Absolutely, absolutely. When I first started there, I was doing the cash flows on my computer. And there was always red in the end. And I thought, oh, this is just a short term thing, you know. But this continued long term. So occasionally, we replenish the coffers and give us some reprieve. But no sooner had we achieved cash flow surpluses and stability, than the next opportunity would come along and we'd be rushing to get that one funded. And so, yeah, often from day one, I had concerns that, how does this get fixed?
25:43 Speaker 00 So how is it that Skase and his mates were allowed to accumulate so much debt? Well, some context. In the mid 1980s, Labor Treasurer Paul Keating, when he isn't tearing shreds off his political opponents, radically reforms the Australian economy. The Hawke government floats the Australian dollar, allows foreign banks to do business here, reduces tariffs, and we all know about those. The idea is to make Australia more competitive on the international market by deregulating, by opening up our economy.
26:17 Speaker 00 One of the upshots of these changes, however, is lax lending. Dick Gross spent years working for the corporate regulator at the time, the NCSC.
26:26 Speaker 05 It created a whole bevy of new players, energised by the new culture, who were trying to buy business, to throw money at these people, and throw money they did. And they changed into a mob who were lending money to over-optimistic entrepreneurs with a loose sense of the truth.
26:52 Speaker 04 Yeah, you're sort of chasing your tail. You've got to keep selling something or raising money to keep paying last month's bills, sort of thing. It works, provided you can keep selling faster than your interest bill. But if you can't sell, and you've paid a lot of money for something...
27:09 Speaker 00 Well, then you might end up in a spot of bother.
27:12 Speaker 01 And it was fine while interest rates were low. It was fine while the economy was growing. But the minute interest rates rose and the economy slowed, it was pretty clear that all the entrepreneurs were going to be in trouble. We could all see it.
27:28 Speaker 04 We all knew what was going to happen, the stock market rises and crashes, just tricky, no one knows exactly when.
27:34 Speaker 00 Well, October 19, 1987 is when. Black Tuesday.
27:40 Speaker 13 Good evening and welcome to PM after an extraordinary 24 hours of international consternation and panic as stock markets plummeted around the world.
27:49 Speaker 14 No one has ever seen falls of this magnitude anywhere, any time in the history of financial markets, not even 1929.
27:56 Speaker 07 It's horrific, it is panic, and there's no sign of it stopping at the moment.
28:01 Speaker 00 Just weeks after the Mirage Resorts opened, the stock market tanks spectacularly.
28:08 Speaker 00 Many of the corporate cowboys take a pounding. Alan Bond and Robert Holmes are caught, and mum and dad investors lose a lot of money. But Skyes comes out of the stock market crash relatively unscathed. His share price goes down about 20%, but he's not heavily exposed to the share market like many others. That, and the cash flow from sales of the Mirage Resort condos, keep him afloat. The problem for Skyes, though, is this: Quintex owes about $1.5 billion, and as interest rates start rising, up to almost 18%, so do the repayments. Might be time to start making some changes, or not.
28:50 Speaker 03 So instead of taking the lesson from the stock market crash of 87, maybe I should pull my horns in, it was throw more big parties and borrow more and go buy bigger deals. So he took no lesson from that. And people were starting to ask serious questions about the viability of Quintex. So what did Skyes do? Just throw another party.
29:12 Speaker 00 Financial status: late 1987, $2 billion. In 1988, Skyes buys a luxury resort in Hawaii, and the parties get even more lavish. The Skyes host a five-day bender at the Gold Coast and Port Douglas Resorts in September for Christopher's 40th birthday. Pixie sends the Quintex jet to Melbourne and back just to pick up her dress for the occasion. Makes the palm tree flight seem frugal by comparison. Skyes flies in celebrities on private jets, Hollywood stars like Dynasty's Catherine Oxenburgh, whose big blonde hair gives Pixie's a run for its money, and Sally Kellerman, aka Hot Lips on Mash.
29:55 Speaker 00 There's Greg Norman, Pat Cash, Formula One driver Nigel Mansell. John Farnham famously performs his latest hit, "A Touch of Paradise", a song that'll always bring Skyes to tears. The celebs are all kitted out in Mirage merch, an inspired bit of marketing as the pics find their way to all the papers and glossy magazines. And then another weekend, Skyes's star presenter at Channel 7, Derren Hinch, scores an invite for a getaway on the luxury yacht Mirage 3, which also had blue marble in it because, of course it did.
30:31 Speaker 07 So I did the show on a Friday night. There was a helicopter waiting outside at Channel 7 to fly me to the airport. Got on his private plane, flew up to Cairns. A Rolls Royce was there waiting to take me further north and then got aboard the Mirage, had a bottle of Grange Hermitage and woke up in the which Sundays. And it was like normal behaviour.
30:57 Speaker 00 I tell you, at the ABC, you're lucky to get a cab charge.
31:02 Speaker 00 Months later, it's time for the legendary Christmas party. It's summer, so it's hot and humid outside, but inside the Gold Coast Mirage, it's a winter wonderland.
31:13 Speaker 03 They turned the air con down to chill and Skyes strode on the stage to Bob Dylan's tune Quinton the Eskimo Man. This giant igloo was created out of silk and it was lit up inside as if it was winter.
31:30 Speaker 15 The bill for the 1988 Quintex Christmas bash was $405,000. Intoxication had set in.
31:39 Speaker 03 The white Christmas party really tells you the extent to which Skyes' ego had really overtaken him because the debts that Quintex was now wobbling under were enormous, nearing 1.5 billion.
31:53 Speaker 05 Look, I understand for people who are listening that it is hard to believe that no one called out these people for their massive loans, their nauseating extravagance and their unfathomable risk. But it's the eternal optimism that keeps the stock market buoyant when it ought not to be.
32:18 Speaker 00 And so it is with Christopher Skyes, the eternal optimist. He keeps on going. Financial status, 1988, age 40. Quintex is worth $2.2 billion, but it owes 1.5. Quintex might be teetering on a mountain of debt, but there's one more valley Skyes is desperate to cross: Hollywood. In 1989, Skyes funds a feature film called Trouble in Paradise. Seriously, there are clues everywhere.
32:52 Speaker 16 My name's Dave Sutter, and I first met Christopher Skyes on a film called Trouble in Paradise. And it was one of those films that was just extraordinarily out of control.
33:08 Speaker 00 Skyes has pulled a big Hollywood star for the film, the American bombshell, Raquel Welsh.
33:13 Speaker 16 I remember getting a call that we had to get a heavy lift helicopter to get Raquel's cast trailer on to the beach because it had to be less than 50 metres from where she was filming. So in the morning, we would get a heavy lift helicopter to move it over to the beach, and then at the end of the day, we'd have to move it back.
33:34 Speaker 00 Hmm, when in doubt, get a helicopter. It all costs an absolute bomb.
33:39 Speaker 16 It was heady times, I guess. There was lots of splashing of the cash at times, and then there was lots of, oh no, we can't afford this and we can't do that. At one stage, there seemed to be a bit of money trouble, like people weren't getting paid. And we could see that the whole project seemed to be imploding. The whispers were just simply that, you know, Skyes is in trouble.
34:03 Speaker 00 Uh-oh, could there be money trouble in paradise? Then, one day, something strange happens. Dave Sutter gets a call. Skyes needs a favour totally unrelated to the film. Can Dave take a truck and go clear out a storage unit packed with some of the Skyes' valuables?
34:24 Speaker 16 We were loading everything from a Rolls Royce to like some pretty valuable statues and artworks. And it was like, move that, put it in there, and then leave. We went, oh, well, that was interesting, all right. And it was like we weren't meant to. Nobody talked about it, it just happened.
34:50 Speaker 00 Oh well, I'm sure it's nothing.
34:58 Speaker 00 Next time on Skase: Fall of a Tycoon, Christopher goes global. He's rubbing shoulders with Charles and Diana. He's a VIP guest at the inauguration of President George Bush Senior. But is the confidence man pushing his luck too far?
35:14 Speaker 03 You stand back and you say, "Christopher, you wanted to be this uber-rich, powerful person. You've got Channel 7, you've got Gold Coast Mirage, you've got Port Douglas, you've got politicians fading over you. Why is that not enough?" And that was his mistake. It was not enough.
35:47 Speaker 00 Skase: Fall of a Tycoon is an ABC Rewind production. Produced on the lands of the Gadigal, Darug and Naluma people. I'm Mark Humphries.
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