Save Log in , register or subscribe to save articles for later. Save articles for later Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time. Got it Normal text size Larger text size Very large text size In his 40-year career as a journalist, Western Australia’s Gary Adshead has pursued the truth – no matter how ugly, how dangerous or how ridiculous. Whether on crooks, crimes, state secrets or heroic rescues, we take you behind the headlines of the biggest stories of his career. See all 18 stories . Ashton Foley was a $200,000-a-year chief operating officer at a major West Australian hospital, then chief executive of a rural Victorian hospital. Michelle Gonzalez was a two-bit fugitive fraudster wanted in the United States. A decade has passed since I met both women and it remains difficult to comprehend how they turned out to be one and the same. To fully appreciate the con-artistry of Foley aka Gonzalez, and how she managed to dupe company executives, politicians, journalists, lawyers and the entire Parliament of Western Australia, a good starting point is a business called Axiom Strategic Consulting – which has never had anything to do with the con artist, but whose name was dragged into the con without its knowledge. “Ashton joined the firm earlier this year, bringing with her nearly two decades of senior management experience,” read the “meet the team” blurb on what had appeared to be Axiom’s website in 2012. “She has worked in an array of highly competitive industries in Australia and overseas, including higher education, pharmaceuticals and banking.” Had anyone bothered to check those credentials, or pushed for more detail about Foley’s background, she would never have been employed to run the operations of Mandurah’s Peel Health Campus, 72 kilometres south of Perth.

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Foley’s life story was bogus and the Axiom webpage, which described her as the company’s managing director, was a complete fabrication. Foley did not graduate “with distinction” from New York University’s Stern School of Business and she was never made a Fellow of the Financial Institute of Australasia. Axiom, which is a legitimate business based in Florida, had never employed Foley. In early 2013, when her identity was beginning to come under scrutiny, I used a search engine to run a check on who was behind the Axiom web address spruiking Foley’s apparent career highlights. I discovered the final lie which ensured her downfall. Foley had registered a fake internet address purporting to belong to Axiom, but in the process she used Michelle as her first name and not Ashton.

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This was significant – because of two phone conversations I’d had with her one week earlier. Before me making those calls and investigating the website, Foley had been getting away with her audacious deception for almost a year. In March 2012, Foley had doctored up a resume from scratch, applied for a lucrative executive position in health administration and a month later, was put in charge of the private-public Peel Health Campus – even as she was wanted in the US state of Georgia on fraud charges. Ashton Foley fabricated both identity and qualifications to become chief operating officer of Peel Health Campus (top) then chief executive of the Orbost Regional Health Service in rural Victoria. Credit: WA Health / Supplied To use a vernacular, Foley had become the fox guarding the henhouse and within months she was causing mayhem, establishing herself as a whistleblower against the hospital when facing pressure about her own management abilities. So convincing was the American-born shyster that a committee of parliament was formed in October 2012, to hear claims the Department of Health had overpaid Health Solutions – then-parent company of Peel Health Campus – as much as $1.8 million. Some of the allegations stacked up, but none were raised out of genuine concerns about an abuse of the public purse.

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Foley had created a smokescreen to take the focus off her own deceit. When Foley, who was born in 1972 according to a US passport, was called to the parliamentary inquiry, no one knew the star witness was a pathological liar. She spent three hours giving evidence under oath while occupying the moral high ground. “There is a lack of transparency from a financial perspective at Peel Health Campus,” she told the committee of Greens, Labor, National and Liberal politicians. “To see some of the things that were going on there was disgraceful.” Despite private concerns about Foley’s bona fides from management at the hospital, including high-profile health leader Dr Neale Fong, the members of parliament took pity on her and asked if she had decided to resign from the hospital because of bullying.

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“There have been threatening phone calls,” she replied. “There have been times when I have been followed. There have been sticky notes that say ‘burn, burn, burn’ put on my door.” As Foley was wrapping up her appearance before the committee, it appeared one MP had grown suspicious. “Just run through – what are your qualifications?” asked Liberal Liz Behjat. Foley couldn’t help herself. “My previous role was director of strategy at Open Universities,” she began. “As part of that, I was senior business and strategic analyst at Phosphagenics Limited, which is a biotechnology company in Melbourne. “In the United States, I was a research analyst and deal coordinator with Merrill Lynch. I also was a licensing and development analyst at Pfizer.” It was all nonsense, but when the committee handed down its final report into the Peel Health Campus issues in November 2012, Foley was lauded as a hero.

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