Richard Ingrams told an interesting story in yesterday's Observer:

In his sadly unpublished memoirs, parts of which I used in the Oldie , Tibor (Casto) told a story of how after Mao Zedong's death he placed a bet with Lloyd's of London that he would be Mao's successor. They gave him odds of 8,000,000,000-1. He then went to the Chinese Embassy in London and offered to give them his projected winnings if they would appoint him chairman, a job which he promised to surrender immediately on taking office. He would take £1 million commission but the Chinese could have the rest, thereby helping to stabilise their rocky economy. Perhaps suspecting a dirty capitalist trick, the Chinese refused to take him up on his imaginative offer.

Of course, as it's now been published the chances of any bookie giving those sort of odds to anyone on the same bet are unlikely, but as I read it I was thinking that there are probably some small countries (in Africa or the Pacific, most likely) who might go along with such a scheme if someone tried it.