MANY people would think twice if a smooth talking stranger asked for an IOU for £65 million in return for the promise of vast profits.
But the government of Vanuatu got out its Biro and signed.
So enthusiastic were the leaders of the South Pacific island state that they even issued diplomatic passports to an Australian businessman, Mr Peter Swanson, and his associates and sent them on their way with their blessing.
Three months on, the persuasive Mr Swanson has disappeared without trace, no profits have materialised and the country faces bankruptcy if the letters of credit for $100 million the government issued are cashed in.
The national ombudsman Ms Marie Noelle Ferrieux Patterson, said the official "IOUs" amounting to more than two years of Vanuatu's total foreign reserves, were circulating internationally in unknown hands.
In a report published yesterday, she said Vanuatu's leaders had gone along with "this incredible plot" either out of "ignorance or greed or both".
On or about April 1st, the reserve bank had issued the bearer bank credits to the visiting group of "promoters" or "investment managers" even though the attorney general had warned that to do so was illegal.
Ms Ferrieux Patterson yesterday urged the president to sack the reserve bank governor, the finance minister and the finance secretary, and to reprimand the Prime Minister, Ms Maxime Carlot Korman.
She also said the government should have nothing more to do with Mr Swanson or New Resources Group (Vanuatu) Ltd and that an urgent application be made to the supreme court for an administrator or provisional liquidator to be appointed over the company.
Mr Swanson's diplomatic passport should be cancelled, she said.
The former joint French British colony of about 165,000 people has only been independent for 16 years. But even so it should really have known better.
In 1994, the Cook Islands government, on the other side of the Pacific, faced a similar situation.
A New Zealand government report found that the Cook Islands had become the "gullible victim" of a fraud when its government signed letters of credit for $1 billion. The Cooks' annual revenue is about $55 million.
In that case, however, the letters of guarantee were cancelled before it was too late.