He is persona non grata in Tonga and has not set foot in the South Pacific's last feudal kingdom since a 2004 legal settlement with an embarrassed Tongan government. He says he fears for his safety in the United States, where tens of thousands of expatriate Tongans have settled.

For Mr Bogdonoff, a Buddhist who once sold magnets to cure back pain, the heady path from banker to court jester to villain began in 2004 when he travelled to Tonga as a financial adviser with the Bank of America. The ageing King Tupou IV had $US20 million ($A26 million) sitting in a cheque account with the bank, the proceeds from selling Tongan passports in the 1980s and '90s — Hong Kong Chinese nervous about the imminent handover to China were big buyers, as was the family of ousted Philippines dictator Ferdinand Marcos. Mr Bogdonoff made Tonga another $US10 million on a buoyant 1990s stockmarket, he says, and was made court jester by royal decree in 1999 — at his own suggestion, because his birthday is April 1 — with the aim of promoting Tonga as a tourist destination.

As jester, he wrote a poem about the king, describing him as a Kublai Khan of the Pacific (although he claims never to have read the Samuel Taylor Coleridge poem) and played saxophone at royal events. He also moved $US26 million from the Tonga Trust Fund into a series of speculative investments and by 2001 it was gone, and only $US2 million recovered.

In impoverished Tonga, many still blame him for the weakness of the Tongan paanga, which makes imported goods out of reach for many. Mr Bogdonoff says the terms of the settlement over the trust fund losses have made him a pauper. He agreed to pay Tonga $US100,000, a percentage of his income until 2014, and 50 per cent of the proceeds of any future book or movie deal about his time as court jester, plus any gambling winnings or inheritance. It was an experience, he says, that "tempered my soul, polished my character and deepened my faith. As glorious and painful as it all was, it appears to have been the perfect training ground for me to do my present therapeutic work."

That work, added to a CV that includes time as a carpenter, professional musician, dishwasher and trail guide, involves helping people whose lives "are not working the way they would like". "The institute consists of just me," he told The Age. "I offer classes in hypnosis and spend most of my time working as a clinical hypnotherapist specialising in relieving post-traumatic stress syndrome."

He was saddened to hear of the death of his old friend the king and held little hope for Tonga under the rule of the eccentric King George Tupou V.