Raymond Borg

Raymond Borg
Born	30 October 1930 Cairo, Egypt
Occupation	Property developer
Years active	1950–64
Board member of	Payne's Properties (1958–62) Reid Murray Group (1958–62) Forest Hill Heights (1958–1960)
Criminal charges	Fraud
Spouse	Ruby Adams (m. 1952)

Raymond Lawrence Adolf Borg (born 14 October 1930) was an Australian businessman whose career in the 1950s–1960s became embroiled in major corporate scandals. Borg began serving as managing director of Payne’s Properties in 1958 and sat on the board of it's parent company, Reid Murray Holdings Limited. In May 1963, the Reid Murray group was placed into receivership amid massive losses, and the ensuing investigations revealed widespread irregularities in the group’s finances and land dealings. It was the largest bankruptcy in the country's history. Borg was charged with fraud for manipulating his firm's money into his own hands, and was subsequently imprisoned at HM Prison Pentridge where he spent five years before fleeing to Canada and later Tunisia.

Biography

Early life

Borg was born on 14 October 1930 in Cairo, Egypt. He met his first wife, Ruby Adams, in late 1949 at a party and they soon emigrated to Melbourne, Australia. He initially worked as a clerk. Borg first made the news in February 1952, when he boldly purchased a 70-year-old fixer-upper terrace home with sloping floors and cracked walls at Gladstone Avenue, Malvern for a reported £1460.

Realestate career

By 1958, Borg was a senior executive in the Reid Murray group of companies, one of Australia’s largest retail conglomerates at the time. He served as the inaugural managing director of Payne's Properties, a wholly-owned Reid Murray subsidiary which dealt solely with the development of shopping centres and large residential estates.

Some of the projects carried out under his watch during the first two years of the company's operation include a 200-lot subdivision in Metung on the Gippsland Lakes, an estate comprising over 100 lots in Scoresby, the 200-lot Forest Hill Heights estate in and around Mahoneys Road at Forest Hill, and two smaller developments in Burwood and Glen Waverley.

Borg (second from left) with model of proposed shopping centre, 1959

Payne's Properties advertisement, 1960

Borg played an important role in the early planning of the £6m Forest Hills Shopping Centre, which was carried out as a joint venture with a consortium of developers and industrialists lead by Paul Fayman. Borg was even sent to the United States to study the country's drive-in shopping trends. The Forest Hills venture soon fell to pieces after the 1960–61 credit squeeze which left it's core directors in financial turmoil, ultimately forcing all but Fayman and his immediate associates to withdraw completely. The Forest Hill centre eventually opened in June 1964 and was considered a pioneering development at the time.

Another notable failed venture associated with Reid-Murray and Fayman's consortium was the ambitious "Australialand" proposal from 1960. The partnership had purchased a large tract of land at Laverton and attempted to establish a knock-off version of Disneyland, but were issued a stern infringement warning from Walt Disney's associates. This, coupled with the ongoing financial crisis, lead to the abandonment of the project.

Yet another unsuccessful proposal from this era was the proposed "Sunbury Satellite Town", comprising over 10,000 homes in the burgeoning regional town of Sunbury. In total, only around 170 residential lots were sold off, and it was later revealed that company's land had been acquired fraudulently.

Government investigations and convictions

By mid-1963 the Read Murray group was collapsing under a debt of some £25.8m. Government auditors and royal commissions scrutinised the accounts, finding many dubious transactions. For example, the official auditors reported that some £1.65 million of instalment debts had been sold off as loans, with the £657,139 discount on these deals omitted from the book. They noted a suspiciously dated sale document (October 1961) that had been back-dated to inflate profits, and “loan” advances of £140,604 to enable directors to buy company shares. In particular, auditors recorded that Payne’s Properties had made unsecured loans to a private firm, Gisborne Pastoral Co. Pty Ltd, whose directors and principal shareholders were Borg and his wife. Many of these intra-group loans (over £100,000 to directors) appeared in breach of company law and possibly “irrecoverable”.

Pentridge, where Borg spent 5 years

By late 1963 the Victorian Government had formally commissioned investigators (led by Queen’s Counsel B. L. Murray and B. J. Shaw) to probe the collapse. Their report, tabled in Parliament, bluntly accused Borg of using his control of Payne’s Properties to fabricate profits and divert company funds for his family’s benefit. Inspectors calculated that “Borg interests received in cash from Federated [Pays Group] funds in excess of £70,000. They found that Borg had directed “a series of dealings primarily designed to produce fictitious profits,” falsifying the accounts to cover short. In one scheme, Payne’s Properties paid an excessive price (about £150,000) to acquire the Louisiana group of companies from Borg’s relatives, effectively transferring about £150,000 of group assets to Borg interests with little real consideration.

The investigations led to criminal charges. In 1965 Borg went on trial in Melbourne’s Supreme Court. A jury found him guilty on multiple counts: four counts of fraudulently misapplying cheques (totaling about £20,000) and one count of forging a sales agreement. Justice Gowans sentenced him to nine years’ imprisonment with hard labour, specifying a minimum of six years before parole. The court also permanently disqualified Borg from holding an estate agent’s licence. His nine-year term was served in Melbourne’s Pentridge Prison, with Borg serving about five years before release. He told the Bankruptcy Court in 1966: "Being in gaol is a tremendous shock. You can survive only by forgetting the past and not thinking about the future".

While Borg served his sentence, other related matters made headlines. Press reports of the era noted financial difficulties for his family: newspapers claimed his parents Alfred and Louise Borg had incurred a large tax assessment (about £116,000) and that their Pascoe Vale home was robbed of £9,000, leading Borg to offer a £3,000 reward for information. In one court hearing a witness even alleged Borg had threatened him knifed if he testified. These accounts appeared in the contemporary press, although they were not central to the official findings.

Emigration to Canada and later Tunisia

After his release from prison, Borg vanished from the Australian business scene. He re-emerged in North America under the assumed name Ray Adams. In Canada he built a successful career in the private healthcare sector – notably by the late 1970s he was known as the owner of Decom, a large medical-waste disposal company based in Toronto. A 1977 Toronto Globe and Mail investigation finally exposed his past: after a year-long probe reporters confirmed that Ray Adams was in fact Raymond Lawrence Adolf Borg. The Globe reported that Borg/Adams had immigrated to Canada in 1973 under a false identity, denying his criminal history. Once identified, Borg disappeared from the public eye once again and is believed to have fled to Tunisia.