Missing canoeist charged with deception

Canoeist charged with fraud and deception (The Observer)

I kind of got the impression that this disappearing act was a scam, if not from the moment he turned up, then not long after. The guy disappeared in a supposed canoe accident out at sea in 2002, then walked into a police station last weekend. It turned out he had been living variously in the family home in England, disappearing into a bedsit next door through a hidden passage whenever people visited, and with his wife in Panama. The moment they said he had amnesia and had managed to disappear for five years, with no reported sightings, alarm bells started to ring in my head.

It begs the question of why they decided to leave Panama. Did they have a row, as one paper reported, or were they just sick of live in the ex-pat community out there?