Well, here's a rum do. A lot of you may know that Emma and I have been putting in a lot of hours over at Onix Central this last eighteen months or so. Actually, it's mainly been Emma, in concert with Robin Tobin. Robin attends a lot of the publishing trade events and Emma's been bumping into him there for years. He used to work at Anko and was involved in their Onix software. Emma and I had also been doing a lot, in-house, with Onix and so it started to seem like a good idea to form a business together. We had lots of ideas, but the main one was to write a piece of software that was like a new and improved version of Anko's Publishing Manager. Since that fateful decision, we've had a lot of ups and downs, but none larger (and more down) than discovering that Robin Tobin is not who we thought he was.

Robin Tobin is his actual name, but almost everything else we thought we knew about him is wrong. For instance, he's been disappearing off to visit his two young daughters, Katie and Anouk, every week for as long as we've been working with him. Only he doesn't have two young daughters. Or if he does, they don't have the names, mothers and home addresses he says. We've also swapped e-mails with his eldest daughter, Liberty, and I've even lent her books. But she doesn't exist either. So presumably when we e-mail with her it's really Robin who replies.

The early days of Onix Central were a bit of a struggle because of an ongoing feud between Robin and his old firm, Anko. They were trying to sue him and had managed to get his accounts frozen. And sure enough, Emma and I would occasionally get e-mails from them accusing him, and by association us, of all sorts of things. Robin advised us never to respond: it might prejudice the court case he was preparing against them. When I discovered that almost everything else I thought I knew about Robin was wrong I got in touch with Anko. It turns out they never sued him and never froze his accounts. Robin's bank accounts weren't frozen; they were simply empty. He just didn't want us chatting to them because of what they could tell us about him, including that he'd caused them a lot of trouble before they'd managed to get rid of him.

Round about this time I started to remember all the ex-girlfriends of Robin's who he'd said were 'stalking' him, so I contacted one of them. And very rapidly I realised that she wasn't stalking him; she was trying to get him to leave her alone. From what I can gather, Robin has had two - sometimes even three - women believing, simultaneously, that he is about to marry them and thinking that when he's not with them he's travelling on business or is with his 'daughters'. Apparently, he adjusts his back-story, his likes and dislikes, and even his personality to please whomever he is trying to charm. And as a result he has left a trail of abandoned women who he has talked out of savings or previous relationships and into debt or pregnancy - and then he's threatened them with all sorts of retribution if they make trouble for him.

As best as we can figure out, Robin has been living like this for years now, probably around two decades: sponging off women who think he's the love of their life and persuading mugs like me that he's a hard-working entrepreneur.

We're still in the process of unscrambling all this. For instance, Anko have very graciously agreed not to do anything about the fact that we have had a laptop of theirs for the last year: we thought it was Robin's and actually paid him for it. We have also been using Anko's software for years believing that we'd bought a licence from them only to discover that we'd bought a licence from Robin and Anko knew nothing about it. We owe Anko a big 'thank you' for their understanding when the truth came out.

Despite all the people who have come forwards, and are still coming forwards, to talk about what Robin has done to them, I'm still not clear how much of it is illegal. What I am clear on is that he is a dangerous man - I don't mean in terms of violence because that doesn't appear to be his style - but in terms of lying like truth and being able to persuade almost anyone of almost anything when we really should know better.

I know it's very unusual to put something like this out in the public domain, and if it were anyone other than Robin Tobin* I'd be worried about a libel suit, but the only way people will be able to avoid making mistakes like the ones we've made is if they're forewarned. So please, consider yourself forewarned.

There's a Part Two to this post here.

P.S. I really didn't choose that picture to make Robin look ominous; I just didn't have another one to hand.

*a libel suit would be hilarious, in a black humour sort of way, because we could keep calling witnesses in our favour for weeks.