HOW TO GET A GILT-EDGED BOARDROOM

Tales of Hoffman: Part 2. Bernard Cornfeld and his incredible money - making machine, Investors Overseas Services (IOS), was the dominant financial phenomenon of the 1960s.

When he began his operation from a tiny flat in Paris in 1956, he confided in a college friend: If you want to make money, don't horse around with washing machines and encyclopaedias. Get into money-that's the move.' In 15 years he amassed funds totalling $100 million.

So it came to pass that Jerome Hoffman, casting around for new ways to build his personal fortune, discovered the offshore fund business which Cornfeld had developed so successfully.

The offshore world IS an astonishing theatre of sharp business practitioners working side-by-side with ambassadors, dispossessed royalty and politicians, scanning the various boards of directors is like exploring an international edition of Who's Who. They congregated in the offshore havens-Liberia, Panama, the Bahamas and Liechtenstein—to evade taxes and the regulations imposed by the crusty financial establishments of London and Wall St. These dramatis persona had only one characteristic in common—it was greed.

The late Mike Todd ('Round the World in 80 Days') was the first film producer to exploit the concept of 'guest appearances'. When a • fellow director asked him how he was so successful in persuading the prima donnas of Hollywood into appearing, Toda replied: The first one is the hardest. But once you've got him, the rest fall over themselves to get into the act.' Hoffman used the Mike Todd technique brilliantly: he also these names in the bag Hoffman went to Washington where men were prepared to overlook his 'mortgage incident' if they could get a piece of the offshore action.

In due course Hoffman produced his prize catch in a memorable press release headed: 'NAMING A GREAT PRESIDENT: The statement went on: 'We are pleased to announce that the Right Honourable Reginald Maudling, former Chancellor of the Exchequer of A few weeks later, amid suitannounced. Hoffman then needed an operational base. He chose Almost to a man they had previously worked for Cornfeld or Gramco-and most had been fired for one reason or another. A typical character hired Hoffman was his executive vice-President, Martin Strauss, who first came to public notice in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1952 when he was arrested for the possession of narcotics.

In the 1960s he ran a sordid trade in girls from Latin America to the United States. It was a mysterious Shalom Fund, a company which collected several thousand dollars from clients before disappearing without a trace-but with the money! There was something faintly satirical about Strauss's article in Hoffman's house journal which said: 'Within this company you find no heavily weighed down corporate structure. Individual initiative is encouraged.' The most cavalier of Hoffman's sales representatives was undoubtedly Senor Guillermo Guitterez, senior executive in Latin America.

Operating from an office in San Jose, capital of Costa Rica, Guitterez planned Hoffman's sales drive on one small republic after another. For his zeal, Guitterez won the coveted title 'Latin American Spark Plug' and a company gift of a newered. 29 sales area covered countries-but it was only legal stock in his sales area were US citizens employed by American corporations. More often than not, they are paid in Us dollars. Under local exchange controls it is either illegal or prohibitive to send these dollars back to America. But the illegal network set up by REFA gave them the opportunity of getting their money out of the unstable regimes and into Western banks. In an interview in London a year ago with Granada's 'World in Action' programme, Guitterez said the other main device for shifting dollars into the company's funds was the black market. By using the illegal currency outlets, the salesmen were able to transfer their money from one republic to the next and eventually out of Costa Rica to the Bahamas where Hoffman originally maintained his banking.