Prison door slams shut on Foster, again

The last time conman Peter Foster completed a prison term in Australia, he emerged with a new mantra and a vow to seek out the simple things in life.

He wasn't interested in business anymore, he said. Or the pursuit of money. He just wanted to find a good woman and give his beloved mum some grandkids.

That was in May 2009, and Foster had just served part of a four-and-a-half year sentence for defrauding the Bank of the Federated States of Micronesia.

The conman, who happily refers to himself as an international man of mischief and a human headline, had taken out a loan, ostensibly to develop a resort in Fiji.

But instead he used the money to pay off his credit card and other debts run up by his family and friends, the latest in a very, very, very long list of fraud and dishonesty charges dating back decades.

A month after regaining his freedom in 2009, Foster publicly mused about the time he'd spent contemplating his troubled life from the inside of a prison cell.

"The highs have been mighty and the lows have been tragic. It's never been dull, and I don't know if a man can ask for much more than that," he told the ABC at the time.

The highs were very high indeed, and peaked, paradoxically, after Foster's Bai Lin "slimming tea" was exposed as a fake in Australia.

Not to be deterred, he left for the UK where he again began to market the tea, and it sold like hot cakes on the back of endorsements by celebrities including his then girlfriend, Page 3 model Samantha Fox, and others, including the Duchess of York Sarah Ferguson.

At one point, Bai Lin was an official sponsor of famed English Premier League soccer club Chelsea, its players sporting the product's logo on their jerseys.

But like every slimming and health product Foster has ever been associated with, and there have been many, Bai Lin was a fraud. Tests later showed it was nothing more than ordinary black tea.

Scam after scam followed, despite Foster being variously fined and jailed in the UK for making false claims about his wonder weight loss products.

On one occasion, while on day release from a UK prison, he escaped and fled to Australia, only to be re-arrested and sent back again.

In between brushes with the law, he sought to expand his shady business, even expanding into the US market with his "special" tea, which re rebranded as Chow Low.

But that only ended with another four months in jail there, again for making false claims.

There are too many other weight loss scandals to mention. But the one that has ultimately landed Foster back in jail in Australia is the "diet spray" SensaSlim.

In 2005, Foster was banned for five years from any involvement in the weight loss industry after his company was found to have made false claims about the diet pill TRIMit.

Last year, the Federal Court found Foster breached that ban in 2009 and 2010, when he involved himself in the now infamous SensaSlim scam, which conned $6 million from 90 investors.

Foster refused court orders to hand himself into police and he again found himself on the run, seeking to evade a three-year jail term handed to him in his absence.

History shows that the long arm of the law always catches up with Foster. His various stints on the lam in Fiji, Vanuatu and Australia have always ended with a prison door slamming shut behind him.

And so it was on Tuesday, when the now grey and ironically overweight Foster tried but failed to outrun police when they raided the northern NSW property where he'd been hiding out.

Police barely raised a sweat as they put the barefoot and dishevelled looking Foster on the ground under a bush and then bundled his ample frame into a police vehicle.

The 52-year-old must now serve at least 18 months of the three-year jail term he was handed while on the run, another "tragic low" in a life that's begging for a Hollywood blockbuster in the vein of Catch Me If You Can.

In and around his stints in jail in the UK, the US, Australia, Fiji and Vanuatu, the man who began his working life as a nightclub and boxing promoter on the Gold Coast formed friendships with the likes of Muhammad Ali.

Much later, well after his rise to infamy, Foster famously embroiled former British prime minister Tony Blair and his wife Cherie in a scandal when it emerged they'd taken real estate advice from him.

You couldn't make this stuff up even if you tried.