SUVA, Fiji — Tonga, the Pacific's only kingdom, is being rocked by a scandal involving the loss of millions of dollars of investments based partially on the advice of its 83-year-old king's court jester — an American businessman.
Millions of dollars have been wiped from a fund the impoverished nation of 100,000 Polynesians built up by selling passports — mainly to Chinese from Hong Kong worried about the return of the territory to Beijing.
Exact details of the missing money remain unclear, but official sources say up to $20 million dollars has disappeared after apparently being invested in the United States in 1999. Much of the money is believed to have been lost when the high-tech bubble burst, sending shares in dot-com companies plunging.
The loss is staggering for a nation run on a budget of around $55 million a year and dependent mainly on revenue from exporting pumpkins and money sent home by Tongans living overseas.
"It is an embarrassment and shows the incompetence of the former finance minister in giving advice to the government," lawmaker and businessman Fred Sevele told The Associated Press in a recent telephone interview.
Tonga's Auditor-General, Pohiva Tuinetoa, last week dashed to the United States to try to discover what happened to money after it was withdrawn from a Bank of America account by the king's official court jester, Jesse Bogdonoff, a California-based investment adviser.
Bogdonoff, who reportedly was appointed jester after impressing King Tupou Taufa'ahau with investment advice and because he was born April 1, could not immediately be reached for comment.
The losses from the secretive Tongan account only came to light recently when the nation's 10-year-old pro-democracy movement began asking questions about it in Parliament, which is dominated by lawmakers appointed by the royal family and Tonga's 33 noble families.
The losses are expected to give new strength to the pro-democracy movement in Tonga, a small archipelago four times the size of Washington, D.C., about two thirds of the way from Hawaii to New Zealand.
However, the overwhelming mass of Tongans regard the king with enormous loyalty and affection and there are expected to be no political reforms until the monarch is succeeded on his death by his less popular son, Crown Prince Tupouto'a.
Last Friday, one of the government's investment fund trustees, Deputy Prime Minister and Justice Minister Tevita Tupou, resigned. Days later, the scandal claimed its second victim with the resignation of Education Minister Tutotasi Fakafanua, who was finance minister in 1999 when the money was withdrawn.
A former British protectorate on an archipelago of 170 islands, of which about 36 are inhabited, Tonga gained independence in 1970.