The Holmes à Courts

"His story has been misunderstood since he was alive, it's been misunderstood since his death." Paul Holmes à Court From the moment he burst onto the business stage in the 1970s, dashing corporate raider Robert Holmes à Court captured the public's imagination with his brilliance and daring. He was the enigmatic and dazzling outsider with a romantic, hazy past à admired, feared and loathed in almost equal measures. With his loyal wife Janet by his side, Robert became Australia's first billionaire. He created a mammoth financial empire that, at the time of the 1987 stock market crash, was worth two billion dollars. But the crash nearly destroyed him. He retreated from the public eye, and set about rebuilding his vast fortune. The effort literally killed him. Robert Holmes à Court dropped dead of a massive heart attack on Father's Day 1990. He was just 53. In a typically unpredictable move, Robert stunned the world by leaving no will. Instead, his widow Janet and their four children have had to decipher a tangled web of assets and debts and determine who would run the family empire. It has taken twenty years for Robert's legacy to be resolved. Now for the first time, this intensely private family are free to tell his tale.