Ross Lightfoot dropped out of school at 13 which might explain his subsequent desire for credential and titles. His Senate CV
used to boast of membership of the New York Academy of Sciences,
something which sounds exclusive but is available for anyone with
US$115.

His website still mentions the grand sounding “Life
Fellow of the International Biographical Association (Cambridge)?” The
Biographical Association is a little more exclusive, but membership is
available to anyone with £795.

In
1968 he travelled to Western Australia to make his fortune in the
mining industry, later establishing a series of companies and heading
up Southern Goldfields Mining Co, Eureka Minerals and A-CAP, a mining
and exploration company of which he was both a director and Chairman.

The Australia-Israel Review
learned that Senator Ross Lightfoot appears to have been a director of
two companies, which were then in the hands of receivers and
liquidators; that those companies have a trail of creditors who lost
more than $2 million; and that the Federal Police have investigated
their affairs.

In 1987 a mining and exploration company called
A-CAP Development Limited registered its head office at 325 Pier St,
Perth. According to the Australian Securities Commission, the directors
of the company were Lloyd Peter Shoobert, Noel Edward Partridge and
Philip Ross Lightfoot.

The present imbroglio which Lightfoot
has enthusiastically created for himself is not the first time he has
been caught up in taxpayer overseas travel problems.

In July
1987 as a member of the Western Australian parliament, Lightfoot
travelled to China, purportedly on parliamentary business, drawing
handsomely on his taxpayer funded parliamentary travel allowance to pay
for expenses.

However, according to former Federal Independent
MP Paul Filing, while the West Australian taxpayer was paying for the
member’s “study trip” abroad, Lightfoot was in fact using the trip to
negotiate multimillion dollar rights for an A-CAP development to
recover gold from mining waste in China.

As a result of this
trip, the Australian ambassador to China, Ross Garnaut, officially
complained to DFAT that Lightfoot had arrived in China as an A-CAP
director when the embassy in Beijing had organised an official welcome
for him in the belief that Lightfoot was on a parliamentary study tour.

Garnaut
wrote that “certainly we feel embarrassed by having been unwilling
agents in what amounts to misrepresentations to the People’s
Institute”. Lightfoot subsequently refunded at least $3,000 of
taxpayers’ money when the scandal blew up on his return to Australia.

But
this travel refund was to be just the beginning of difficulties
surrounding A-CAP. In October 1990 a liquidator, Barry Taylor, of
Ferrier Hodgson Chartered Accountants was appointed by the ACT Supreme
Court to wind up the company and its subsidiary Coolkalg Resources
Limited. It appears that A-CAP had amassed large losses and left $2.14
million of outstanding debts to creditors.