Ray never comes to me for advice. Why would he? The former CEO of HIH insurance - once one of the largest insurance companies in the Southern hemisphere. What possible wisdom could I have to pass on to him?

Me asking Ray for advice - that happened all the time! Every time I needed to know how to manage our church or how to handle a staff member or how to balance a budget, I'd be on the blower to Ray. And the man always came through for me!

Perhaps it would be helpful at this point to insert a brief comment about how I developed this sort of relationship with Ray.

By unhappy coincidence, my dear father died in March 2001 - the same month that Ray's company, HIH Insurance, went into liquidation.

Prior to March 2001, Ray wouldn't have been able to play the role of fatherly advisor to me even if he had wanted to. He had been a generous supporter of our Youth Centre at one stage, but had never had the time to really get involved.

All that changed after March 2001, and by the time we re-established contact, he was pouring most of his time into voluntary work - driving the bus at the retirement home where his mother lived and doing the cleaning at his son's tennis club. It didn't take long before we had him on the team at every fund-raiser we put on for our Youth Centre.

And somewhere in that period between March 2001 and September 2004, Ray made a transition from being a much-appreciated volunteer and supporter, to be a dearly-loved friend and father-figure. I should have been chuffed that he wanted my advice on something. But I wasn't pleased at all. I was scared.

Ray had sounded rather fragile when I had spoken to him on the phone the night before, and Ray never normally lets things get him down. What could it be? Was he dying? Was someone in his family seriously ill?

When Ray came to the door, that fragility that I'd heard in his voice was showing on his face. 'Are you alright?', I asked. 'Are you sick?' 'Oh no, I'm fine', he said. 'It's just the legal stuff that's getting to me'. I knew it must be pretty serious.

'They're ready to plea bargain with me', Ray explained, as he sat down in my office, 'and I don't know what to do?'

I had heard about plea bargaining on American cop shows, where some no-good hoodlum dobs in his boss in exchange for getting a shorter sentence, or something like that. Ray explained how the system worked in Australia. Not surprisingly, it is a little more subtle.

Apparently they never actually use the term 'plea bargaining' or openly 'bargain' at all. Apparently the lawyers from opposing camps just chat whimsically about 'where they might draw a line' if such-and-such were to happen. It's a sort of Clayton's bargaining process - the bargain you make where no one can ever prove that you made a bargain.

Ray told me the bargain they'd offered him. 'They've told me that if I plead guilty to three relatively minor charges, that they'll stop pursuing me on all other matters.'

'OK. That sounds pretty encouraging', I said.

I knew they'd been compiling an enormous list of charges to bring against Ray - charges that ranged from the uninformed to the completely ridiculous, so far as I could see. Nonetheless, the prosecutors seemed to operate on the principal that if they threw a lot of accusations at him, some of them were bound to stick.

My favourite old philosophical adage holds true of course, that ten leaking buckets hold exactly the same amount of water as does one leaking bucket - ie. no water at all. Even so, the multi-bucket approach carries a certain emotive force, and given that these characters needed to justify the amount of public money that had been spent on pursuing Ray, this also made it appear as if they'd been earning their fat salaries.

Ray had gone silent. I prodded him again. 'So what's the problem. They've offered to drop most of the charges in return for finding you guilty on a couple of little ones. It sounds to me like they've recognised that they haven't really got much against you. That's a good thing, isn't it?'

'Yes', said Ray, 'but the problem is... these things that they want me to plead guilty to... I didn't do them!'

Ah! So there's the rub!

Ray went on to explain, 'if the charges were simply that I'd been negligent or had overlooked something that I shouldn't have overlooked, I think I could live with that, but these charges say that I 'deliberately misled people' and that I 'knowingly withheld information', and David.. 'I didn't! If I had known some of these things, there's no way I would have held back the information. I didn't know these things! But now they're telling me that unless I confess to the charges, I will go to gaol!'

The overall picture was pretty ugly. Allow me to summarise:

What was put to Ray was that if he confessed to the three little crimes, the whole legal inquisition would be over by Christmas, and he would probably not have to spend any time in gaol.

Conversely, he was told in no uncertain terms, that if he did not confess to the three little crimes, the legal team would pursue him with everything that they had, that the case would drag on for another two to three years, that it would cost him between two and three million dollars more in legal fees, and that he would certainly end up in gaol at the end of it all!

Now I'm not privy to Ray's personal financial affairs, but I do know that he lost everything when HIH collapsed. There was no way that he could afford to fight the legal battle for another two or three years, and even if he did have the financial resources, I wonder if he could have lasted emotionally. They seemed to have him over a barrel, but Ray couldn't bring himself to accept the inevitable conclusion. I didn't want to accept it either.

'Now is not the time to sell your soul, is it Ray?', I said. 'No', he said, 'and I know I couldn't carry through with it anyway. Even if I did sign something now, saying that I confessed to these things, I'd get up before the court and somebody would look me in the eye and ask 'Did you deliberately withhold this information?' and I'd break down. I'd say 'no, I didn't.' I wouldn't be able to carry it through. I've got to keep fighting. But how can I?'

Apparently one senior legal guy had said to Ray, 'Look mate, I'd confess to raping my own mother if it would keep me out of gaol.' Ray had been unimpressed, but he was in a dilemma.

This is the way our legal system works. I've seen it operate like this before - grinding good people down until they can't fight any more. Truth is not the issue. Neither is guilt or innocence. It's a war between two parties, and Ray had got on the wrong side of the Government and the media, and was being scapegoated to assauge the public thirst for vengeance. What hope did he have?