Peter Foster
Peter Clarence Foster is an Australian career criminal who has been imprisoned in Australia, United Kingdom, the United States, and Vanuatu for a variety of offences related to weight loss and other scams as well as absconding from justice. His convictions range from fraud and money laundering to contempt of court and resisting arrest.
Foster was also in the headlines for his role in helping Cherie Blair, wife of British prime minister Tony Blair, buy properties in Bristol at a discounted rate. Foster has described himself as an "international man of mischief".
Early career
Foster began marketing and selling products at 19 years of age. Nicknamed "kid tycoon" and the "milkshake tycoon", Foster was promoting themed nights at a Gold Coast discothèque two years before he was legally allowed in the club and became a boxing promoter at 17.At 20, Foster was fined by an Australian court for attempting to make a fraudulent insurance claim when a boxing match he was promoting fell through.
The following year, Foster became a television producer and filmed a documentary with Muhammad Ali while living several weeks with him in his home in Los Angeles. He was declared bankrupt after promoting an Ali bout in Australia that did not eventuate and marketing a method for quitting smoking.
Foster was also known for his relationship with model Samantha Fox, whom he hired to promote his weight loss tea. She later distanced herself from him and remarked:
A number of years later, Foster suggested that he and Fox make a film about their lives, but she sent a refusal via her lawyer.
Bai Lin Tea and Chow Low Tea weight loss scams
Muhammad Ali's third wife, model Veronica Ali, introduced him to Bai Lin tea, which Foster went on to market in Australia as an "ancient Chinese diet secret" for weight loss. The company went bankrupt while under investigation by the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission, whereupon he took the tea to the United Kingdom, hiring Samantha Fox to promote it, and securing a deal with London football club Chelsea F.C. to promote the tea on their shirts.Under testing, the tea was proven to be ordinary black China tea and Foster's company was fined £5,000 in 1988 for breaching the UK Trade Descriptions Act. However, Foster fled Britain to the United States where he remarketed it as Chow Low Tea. Advertisements in The New York Times and The Washington Post claimed the tea lowered the cholesterol levels of its consumers no matter what they ate. The fraudulent claims saw him convicted for conspiracy to commit grand theft and he served four months in a Los Angeles prison. Fraudulently stating that a food product could lower cholesterol was a crime.
In 1994, Foster returned to England and was fined £21,000, with £8,000 costs, in relation to the outstanding Bai Lin Tea fine. In 1996 he was imprisoned over his sales of slimming granules for conspiring to provide a product with a false description. Nine months later he absconded while on day release from open prison and returned to Australia on a false passport. The ACCC charged him with fraudulently marketing Biometrics, a "thigh contour treatment". He was fined $15,000 and compelled to sign an undertaking to desist from making statements about the therapeutic effects of the product. He was then jailed for five months on charges relating to withholding information from the Australian Securities & Investments Commission.
Foster was arrested in Australia on a British extradition warrant, but absconded on bail to be rearrested in February 1998. He spent over 18 months in prison in Brisbane fighting extradition, claiming his life would be at risk if he returned because he was an informant against corrupt prison officers. He was returned to Britain and imprisoned in 2000 for a further 33 months at St Albans Crown Court for using fraudulent documents to obtain credit for a company, Foremost Body Corporation, that sold thigh-reduction cream. Having served time on remand, Foster was released, but banned for five years from holding company directorships in the UK. Told by the judge, "the sooner you go from the country the better", Foster returned to Australia, but moved to Fiji where he became involved in politics in 2001, before resurfacing in Britain and Ireland in 2002.
Work as police informant
Foster undertook undercover work for the Australian Federal Police in 1993 and 1997, wearing listening devices in meetings with known criminals as part of investigations into the trafficking of illicit drugs. Foster said in an interview that he was influenced to take part by the effect his sister's longstanding drug addiction had on his family, and that he had always been against drugs. In a comment on Foster, criminologist Rick Sarre said that confidence tricksters will often assist police so they can use it as a bargaining chip if they are caught for an offence.Fiji 2000–2001
In 2001, in the wake of the 2000 Fijian coup d'état, Foster invested over F$1 million in the New Labour Unity Party, a breakaway group from the Fiji Labour Party. He became 2001 Fijian general election campaign director for Tupeni Baba, the former deputy prime minister, whom Foster described as the "Nelson Mandela of the South Pacific". Describing himself as a "freedom fighter for Fiji", Foster expressed concern that there could be another coup if the FLP leader and former prime minister, Mahendra Chaudhry, who had been deposed in the 2000 coup, returned to office. Laisenia Qarase and his SDL party won government.Cherie Blair controversy
2002 "Cheriegate" scandal and deportation
Foster was investigated by the UK Department of Trade and Industry in 2002 for effectively acting as the managing director of slimming pill business Renuelle, despite being barred for five years in 2000 from holding company directorships. Former business partners, including former professional footballer Paul Walsh, accused Foster of conning them into investing £150,000 in Renuelle. At the time he was fighting deportation to Australia to face fraud charges for a separate weight loss scam.The controversy involving Cherie Blair occurred when it was revealed that Foster had assisted the wife of the then prime minister, Tony Blair, with the purchase of two flats in Bristol at a discount. The transaction came to light after Foster claimed that Walsh had threatened to expose the link with the Blairs unless he was returned the money he had invested. Walsh denied the blackmail accusation.
When the deal became public knowledge, Cherie Blair tried to distance herself from Foster and released a public statement claiming he was not involved with the purchase. The Daily Mail newspaper provided email evidence to the contrary; in one email between Blair and Foster she described him as "a star" and said, "we are on the same wave length, Peter". Blair made a public apology, blaming her "misfortune" on the pressures of running a family and being a mother.
Foster told the media that Cherie and Tony Blair at one time agreed to be godparents to the yet-to-be born child of Foster and his partner Carole Caplin, who later miscarried. He also said that he celebrated Christmas with the Blair family and was a guest at 10 Downing Street on the night of his 40th birthday, however, Blair declared in her apology she had only met him once, for less than five minutes. Foster later acknowledged that apart from one brief meeting, he had only spoken with her by phone three times and corresponded with her by email. He acknowledged Blair had not attempted to influence his deportation order from the UK. He was also covertly recorded by The Sun newspaper coaching his mother to speak to the media about a visit to 10 Downing Street on his birthday that never took place.
Foster later claimed, on his 2004 ABC TV Enough Rope appearance, that he believed his partner was pregnant with Tony Blair's child, the product of a long-standing extramarital affair. However, The Times investigated the claims and found them "a catalogue of errors and inconsistencies" and an "elaborate hoax". Carole Caplin said about Foster's claims: "This is just a new way for Peter to get attention. He is just a fantasist and these absurd stories shouldn't be given any credibility."
In a press statement during the scandal, Foster also claimed "no one has ever lost money through my enterprises" and asked "Could it be I had to be discredited by the establishment?" Journalist Malcolm Brown disputed this, writing that thousands had lost money. Three years before, in 1999, former Consumer Affairs commissioner Jan Taylor, and Foster's former sales manager James Small, described how many of Foster's victims were middle income earners who were left financially devastated by his scams.
Foster dropped his plans to fight the deportation order in the weeks following the Blair scandal and moved to Ireland.
Complaints to the Press Complaints Commission
Following a complaint to the Press Complaints Commission, The Sun newspaper was found guilty of "one of the most serious forms of physical intrusion into privacy" over taped telephone calls involving Foster during the Cheriegate scandal.The commission condemned the paper for having published transcripts of conversations between him and his mother. The commission upheld Foster's case that there was no public interest in publishing the transcripts of the conversations, contrary to the argument of the former editor.
The Sun admitted it had behaved "improperly" in covering the Press Complaints Commission findings and publishing the adjudication.
The Press Complaints Commission rejected another complaint from Foster that articles of 13, 14 and 17 December 2002 were inaccurate. The complaints about these articles were:
- That the transcripts were edited to distort the meaning of the conversations. The commission found that there was no evidence of this.
- Foster disputed the paper's claims that he had tried to sell his story to Granada Television, though the Press Complaints Commission concluded that as he had appeared to try to sell the story any inaccuracy about the company he had tried to sell the story to was not significant.
- The commission concluded that The Sun was entitled under the code to express its view that Foster had tried to "ruin" Tony Blair and that the paper had not breached the code when it had claimed on 17 December that Foster had not told the truth in a statement to the press.