Wealthy man charged with faking own death
Four years after he was officially pronounced dead, a wealthy businessman has appeared in a Sydney court charged over a 3.5 million Australian dollars (€2.2m) life insurance fraud.
Harry Bentley Gordon, 56, was arrested at Sydney Airport after arriving from New Zealand on Monday night.
Gordon, a New Zealand-born qualified engineer, had officially drowned in a boating mishap in his 16-foot runabout on the New South Wales state coast north of Sydney in June 2000.
Gordon’s New Zealand sister-in-law, Margie Gordon, said she and her husband Mike were completely flattened by news he was alive, The Australian newspaper reported today.
They had not known Gordon had been living in New Zealand only three hours drive away with a new wife he had married under an assumed name, the paper said.
“We are just amazed he is alive and it’s a terrible thing to do,” she was quoted as saying.
“We just thought he was dead; it’s really horrible.”
She and her husband would not be travelling to Sydney to see Gordon in jail, she said.
