Former Hastie executive Ian Athol Thompson faces a legal battle with corporate watchdog ASIC

THE Porsche-driving Brisbane bizoid stepped down in December as MD and CEO of electrical contracting giant J&P Richardson Industries and now faces a legal battle with ASIC.

Illustration of Ian Athol Thompson by Brett Lethbridge.

IT looks like the past has caught up with Ian Athol Thompson in a big way.

The Porsche-driving Brisbane bizoid stepped down in December as MD and CEO of electrical contracting giant J&P Richardson Industries after five years at the helm.

His LinkedIn page says he now works as a consultant but, perhaps not surprisingly, it makes no mention of his time at now-defunct Hastie Services, where he served as chief operating officer.

That entity was part of the global engineering services colossus Hastie Group, which collapsed in 2012.

Citing “accounting irregularities,’’ it went down owing nearly $1 billion, making it one of the worst post-GFC corporate disasters.

About 2700 workers across Australia lost their jobs, while banks wrote off more than $500 million used to fund a botched acquisitions binge and shareholders walked away with nothing.

It’s taken six years but the corporate watchdog charged Thompson and former Hastie Services director Joseph Carmec Farrugia in November with three counts of conspiracy to falsify accounts.

ASIC alleges they colluded with two other Hastie executives to give false or misleading information to an auditor and falsified ledger entries to hide the true financial position of the firm between late 2008 and mid-2011, when the group sought to raise $160 million from investors.

The two gents, who each face up to nine years in the iron motel, have not entered a plea but the case returns to a Sydney court on May 8.

Two of their former colleagues plead guilty last year to the same charges, with one getting an 18-month suspended sentence and the other hit with a two-year term.

BLAMING OTHERS

TO the astonishment of senior staffers, J&P Richardson hired Thompson in January 2013, just months after Hastie crashed.

City Beat spies say the Pommy expat, now 52, distanced himself from the debacle, casting blame elsewhere.

Within about six months, he made quite a few enemies with a restructuring plan that saw more than 100 employees in the workforce of 500-plus made redundant.

It didn’t help his image that he soon swapped an old Commodore for a shiny new Mercedes-Benz.

J&P Richardson, which launched in 1958 and grew to become one of Australia’s biggest privately operated electrical contractors, was acquired by French industrial titan Vinci Energy in early 2016.

Vinci kept Thompson in the job but eyebrows were raised once ASIC operatives started paying a few visits to the company’s Wacol headquarters.

Within a month of ASIC swooping and laying charges, Thompson was out the door for good, zooming away in his Porsche 911.

Taking his place was Craig Richardson, who did not respond to a request for comment yesterday.

Thompson, who splashed out $1.4 million on a Balmoral home in 2015, also did not return a call seeking comment yesterday.

He now works for Themis Consulting, where he is “an executive leader in the utilities, infrastructure and resources markets’’.

Farrugia could not be contacted.

FACE TO FACE

A SMALL group of protesters outside Adani’s offices in Townsville came face-to-face this week with the building owner, who gave them a piece of his mind.

Brisbane real estate supremo Warren Ebert confronted the 20-strong crowd, telling them to get off private property and protest in a public space.

When asked if he worked there, the Sentinel Property Group boss responded that he owned the place.

As one of the protesters sipped a soy latte, Ebert rolled his eyes.

“Drink a real coffee. Soy latte, exactly what I would expect,’’ he grumbled.