Theft, scams and backpacks of gold: Inside playboy Alex Mendieta-Blanco’s empire
Jetsetting jewellery dealer Alex Mendieta-Blanco was famous for having Delta Goodrem at his party. But he was also convicted of a scam worth up to $1bn. This is how his empire worked.
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All day long, couriers weighed down with backpacks full of gold caught the lift up to playboy jewellery dealer Alex Mendieta-Blanco’s office on the 11th floor and returned to ground level lighter – and richer.
The task, a simple part of a complex web involving high-speed gold dealing, stolen jewellery and vast claims for tax refunds, was lucrative.
Runners were paid $500 a kilo – a fraction of the $77,000 a kilo the precious metal is worth but enough to make some extremely wealthy.
“It was like Pulp Fiction,” one person who regularly sold gold at the nondescript office building in the Melbourne CBD said.
“I would put up to 40 kilos of gold in a backpack, and then walk 15 metres and sell it again.”
Colombian-born Mendieta-Blanco made enough money from slinging gold to enjoy a luxurious lifestyle full of fast cars, designer brands and first-class travel.
At his peak, before he was handed four months jail for receiving stolen goods in 2020, the Melbourne-based businessman even hired pop star Delta Goodrem to play at his birthday party.
While Mendieta-Blanco pleaded guilty to receiving $29,000 worth of stolen gold jewellery, the true scale of his business empire, which had close links with a large-scale GST scam, was far larger.
Documents obtained by the Herald Sun show that in 2016 Mendieta-Blanco’s company Sell Your Gold, which traded as Gold Buyers Melbourne, turned over $64.4m worth of gold – more than twice the $25.7m it turned over the previous year.
Large quantities of gold flowed through Mendieta-Blanco’s office, bought and sold in a pattern of circular transactions that often occurred on the same day, Administrative Appeals Tribunal documents show.
The flow was boosted by “off the books” gold in the shape of stolen jewellery, according to prosecution documents filed with the Victorian County Court as part of Mendieta-Blanco’s guilty plea.
Audio and video surveillance cameras set up as part of an elaborate investigation led by the head of Victoria Police’s elite anti-bikie Echo Taskforce, Gary Measham, revealed that profits were also boosted by “skimming” – deliberately underpaying customers who brought in stolen goods.
Industry sources estimate that Mendieta-Blanco personally reaped about $20m from the business.
One source told the Herald Sun they often sold Gold Buyers Melbourne between 10kg and 20kg of the precious metal a day.
The source said Mendieta-Blanco regularly kept about $1m cash on hand in a drawer full of $50 bills.
“The amount of money there – f**k me,” the source said.
When police raided the office in October 2017, they seized jewellery, gold and cash worth $1.9m, company documents show.
In AAT proceedings in which a company that bought gold from Mendieta-Blanco’s business, Sell Your Gold, sought to overturn a Tax Office decision denying them the benefit of input tax credits, the ATO alleged the rapid fire gold transactions were part of a bigger scheme that ripped it off by almost $9.5m in dodgy GST refunds in 2016.
At the time, GST fraud in the gold trade was rife, with the total cost of the scam across the industry estimated to have stung taxpayers by between $700m and $1bn by the time it was shut down by the then financial services minister, Kelly O’Dwyer, in June 2017.
The rort relied on the fact that GST is payable on “scrap” gold jewellery but not on pure gold bullion such as bars or coins.
Participants in the scam bought gold that they falsely claimed was scrap and refined it, then claimed a credit for GST they never paid.
But in an AAT ruling in January, evidence from Mendieta-Blanco that much of the gold he bought and sold was actually melted down from jewellery helped defeat part of the ATO’s $9.5m claim.
Under interrogation by tax officers, Mendieta-Blanco said sellers brought gold bars into the office in messenger bags and backpacks.
The bars were “just deformed and ugly with … (a) little borax and stuff” left over from gold smelting, he told the ATO.
A source close to the criminal investigation into Gold Buyers Melbourne said this was because the bars included stolen jewellery that was melted down.
Mendieta-Blanco was originally charged with 450 counts of receiving stolen goods, but by the time he pleaded guilty in July 2020 the charges had been whittled down to one of receiving stolen goods and one of possessing cocaine, which was dropped on the courthouse steps.
He received four months jail while his brother, Julio, who also worked in the business, was spared time inside and an employee, Chey Tenenboim, got 12 months.
The jail time doesn’t seem to have done too much harm to Alex Mendieta-Blanco’s life.
After getting out he was poised to buy a superyacht with the influencer girlfriend of banned Gold Coast property spruiker Jamie McIntyre, but the vessel sank before the deal went through.
After moving to Barcelona, he now bills himself as an entrepreneur and philanthropist “who is passionate about using his fortune to help people all over the world”.
He didn’t respond to questions emailed to the contact address on his personal website and texted to his Australian mobile phone number.
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Originally published as Theft, scams and backpacks of gold: Inside playboy Alex Mendieta-Blanco’s empire
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