Within months of talking to the Guardian his revelations had gone stratospheric and he'd moved from a secret place in Hong Kong to Moscow to request political asylum.
You speak maybe about stratospheric numbers where we will not be involved – not at that level – for financial reasons.
And with stratospheric land values, developers are trying to squeeze everything they can out of every parcel of land".
And whereas valuations in the late 1990s were stratospheric, the price-earnings ratio on the global-technology index is currently 22.
Who knows, a little competition might even bring the price down from something that is out of this world, to a level that is merely stratospheric.
He remained MP for his Scottish highland constituency until May 7th, when he found himself at the junction of the two most dramatic trends at the general election: the stratospheric rise of the Scottish National Party and the collapse of the Lib Dems.
He has been humbled by approval ratings that, in less than a year, have plummeted from the stratospheric to the dismal.
Borrowing is stratospheric, the deficit vast and, though the chancellor avoided this particular projection, unemployment is heading for the iconic 3m mark.
True, it has 37.5% of the world's satellite capacity (at the end of 1995, as against pre-merger PanAmSat's 4.9% and Hughes's 5.7%) and its sales are still increasing but at nothing like the stratospheric pace of PanAmSat's.
Raising money for education is a challenge everywhere and Hong Kong's system compares favourably with, say, British private schools, where prices are stratospheric, or American ones, where parents' "contributions" often can carry the same benefits as debentures, but have no market-signalling value.
Though it might seem that the current bonanza should have made life easy for the world's biggest oil producer, stratospheric oil prices have actually put the Saudis in an uncomfortable position.
