David Collard is a high-flying entrepreneur, now accused of $150m tax fraud
Former Geelong boy turned rich lister David Collard recruited talent from his hometown — including a local radio queen — to help run his global empire. Now he’s accused of tax fraud.
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The rain that caused mayhem at this year’s Monaco Grand Prix didn’t dampen the spirits of entrepreneur David Collard and his entourage as they sipped French bubbly while living life in the fast lane.
It was a long way from St Joseph’s College in Geelong where a number in the party had gone to school with Collard.
There were plenty of old war stories from the all-boys alumni as they took in the glitz and glamour.
They were in Monaco on Collard’s dime to celebrate the recent engagement of his best mate James Fatone.
Many describe Fatone as being like the loyal lapdog, “Turtle” to Collard’s slick “Vinny Chase” from the hit TV series Entourage.
Collard knows how to splash cash and over the past decade he appeared to accumulate a lot of it in various entrepreneurial ways.
His steep rise saw him go from a trainee accountant in the Melbourne office of PwC to opening the headquarters of his investment company, Scale Facilitation, in the One World Trade Centre in December last year. He moved into a flashy apartment on what is dubbed Billionaire’s Row in New York, where stars like Sting, Jennifer Lopez and Dell founder Michael Dell have resided. Collard now gets around with a driver, two personal assistants and security detail 24/7.
Collard was a high-flyer in a hurry, a stunning success story of an Aussie made good on the world financial stage with Federal Opposition Leader Peter Dutton even describing him as “Superman”.
He’d brought Fatone along for the ride to “take on the world”, employing him as Scale Facilitation’s ‘chief of staff and director of industrial relations’ despite his relative inexperience in business.
The highlight of his CV was owning a fish and chip shop in Geelong.
The pair were tight, which was why there was no expense spared in Monaco for Collard’s Turtle.
But less than a month later, the trip was the furthest thing from Fatone’s mind after Australian Federal Police officers from the Serious Financial Crime Taskforce wearing blue gloves and carrying evidence bags turned up with a search warrant as part of an investigation into “allegations of tax fraud.”
For those who thought Collard’s rise to the top was too good to be true, and there have been plenty of those, the Friday June 23 raid on his North Geelong Scale Facilitation office was the first real sign that maybe it was.
Staff and vendors on the ground in Geelong were already voicing concerns that they had not been paid for several weeks.
A Page 13 investigation, which spoke to more than two dozen sources connected to the chaos, can now reveal the AFP search warrants were conducted in association with the Australian Taxation Office over allegations of four charges of tax fraud amounting to $150m across four different businesses.
Details in the search warrants include allegations of misappropriation of Federal Government grants.
Collard and Scale deny all allegations.
Collard has told concerned investors the raids came about because of a disgruntled employee who hadn’t been paid and that there was nothing else to see here.
Unfortunately for Collard and the business, it seems there could be a lot more to see.
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David Collard saw an opening.
The stories of his schoolyard soft drink racket differ depending on who you talk to, but former students say Collard started stuffing cans of Coke and other soft drinks into his school bag and selling them at a profit to thirsty students on the sly from his locker.
Legend has it he later “rented” out more lockers to expand his scheme.
That was the start of Collard’s entrepreneurial ways.
After graduating in 2002 and joining RMIT’s Business School he began a traineeship at PwC’s Melbourne office.
Ambitious and always looking for the big break, Collard moved to New York in 2011 to work for PwC’s banking and capital markets.
In July 2017 he became (according to him) PwC’s “youngest partner” at the age of 32.
To celebrate the milestone his parents and some of his St Joey’s mates flew over from Australia to party at the famous Rainbow Room on top of the Rockefeller Centre, courtesy of the accounting firm.
Collard left the accounting giant after a colleague told him an Australian would never make it to a global leadership role.
He then saw a gap in the market early during Covid in the “sanitising” space, taking over a company called SaniteX Global.
Headlines pumped him up as the Aussie bloke saving the boys in blue, with his company providing PPE uniforms to the NYPD.
Things really started rolling for Collard, who now had fingers in many pies, even registering business names for medicinal cannabis back in Australia.
Then he went nuclear, opening new headquarters on the 82nd floor of One World Trade Centre, the former twin towers location destroyed in terrorist attacks in 2001.
Collard bragged it was the “highest commercial full-floor lease in America” and to celebrate Scale Facilitation’s new home, he threw a lavish party last December for more than 200 people to soak in the 360-degree views of New York.
His colleagues were quick to point out you could see Collard’s rented apartment overlooking Central Park, worth $US23.5m, as they sipped handcrafted cocktails.
The high-powered guest list included Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles and Peter Dutton – parliamentary disclosures show Scale flew the Opposition Leader out and put him up – as well as Australia’s UN ambassador Mitch Fifield and New York Consul-General Nick Greiner.
In his speech at the party, Collard praised his advisory board members, whose names were quietly scrubbed from the company’s website the day of the AFP raids.
“Your name is everything at the end of the day, and they put their names behind me very early on … I leveraged their brand,” he said.
Mark Schwartz, an advisory board member and former US Special Forces soldier, praised Collard’s passion but sounded a note of caution about his controlling approach.
“Dave was a bit of a ball hog when he played basketball as a youngster and we’re trying to get him to pass it a little bit more around the organisation,” Schwartz said.
Event MC April Palmerlee, the American Chamber of Commerce in Australia CEO, acknowledged she “got caught with the David Collard bug.”
“If you don’t want to back Scale Facilitation, do not take a call from David Collard,” she said, prompting laughter from the crowd. “He is so convincing.”
But other attendees later remarked on what they said was a “cult-like” approach to Collard.
Marles was a fan given that a month earlier Collard had revealed plans to build a massive battery production facility, dubbed the ‘gigafactory’, at the Avalon Airport in his Corio electorate.
Elon Musk first coined the term about the type of massive battery factory needed to meet demand for electric cars.
Another of Collard’s companies, Recharge Industries, was planning to manufacture large-scale lithium-ion batteries, crucial for electric cars and grid storage on the airport site.
It would be one of the biggest facilities of its kind in the world and was spruiked to add nearly $15 billion to the state’s economy over the next two decades, turning the region into a new technology hub.
Marles called Collard a “force of nature” who was “values-driven” and “innately entrepreneurial”.
He praised him for pursuing the battery factory project in his Corio electorate, describing it as “something of a holy grail” in Australia, adding: “We could not be more proud of you.”
Dutton described Collard, who he met the year before at an Australian American Leadership Dialogue event, as “Superman”.
“He has the ability to see around corners and over the horizon and that is an incredible quality,” he said.
That vision sent Collard to the UK in January where he raised eyebrows by coming in as a late bidder for the collapsed UK battery maker Britishvolt where he again outlined plans for a gigafactory similar to his Avalon project.
The bailout of the British company was to set Collard back $15 million, while the land on which the factory was to be built was to cost an extra $17.5 million.
But despite this pivot to Britain by Collard, Marles was still spruiking the Avalon project in May and toured the proposed site for the gigafactory on land controlled by trucking magnate Lindsay Fox and his family.
Also there were two other Labor pollies, science Minister Ed Husic and Libby Coker, the MP for Corangamite, the electorate next door.
The company talked up the prospect of 2500 jobs at the gigafactory, which would complement the one in the UK.
But informed sources say Collard’s crew has not signed a lease agreement with Linfox, where senior executives are understood to have be puzzled by the entrepreneur’s plan to run a factory near Geelong from his office on the 82nd floor of One World Trade Centre in New York, the other side of the world.
Collard cultivated links between researchers at Deakin University and Scale Facilitation to get $10 million from a $50 million grant to the university.
This was “to drive the largest green manufacturing ecosystem in Australia,” the company said in August last year.
All these grand plans sounded good, looked spectacular on paper, but where was the substance?
An Australian government official said they were mystified by the Scale Facilitation business model, as the fund planned to raise $2.5bn this year.
“I just don’t get it … I don’t understand how they are making any money,” the official said.
And when the pay cheques for his staff, some who had even uprooted their families in Australia to move to New York did not arrive, legitimate questions were being asked.
In Geelong one of Collard’s long-time associates, well-known local radio personality Roxie Bennett, was holding the fort.
She had met Collard when he called into the station after winning a CD and had been flown to New York to co-host the party for the opening of the company’s headquarters.
Page 13 understands she was in the company’s North Geelong office when the AFP came knocking.
Bennett and Fatone both refused to comment.
Scale Facilitation issued a response following the June 23 raids to say “the company denies any wrongdoing and is working with legal and other advisers to defend any matters arising from these discussions.
“As this is an ongoing matter, we cannot and will not be providing any additional comment to the media at this time.”
Back in happier times Collard told guests at his opulent One World Trade Centre launch last year that “You can make comfortable decisions or you can make decisions that challenge you … it’s definitely not easy.”
Life for David Collard is about to become a lot more challenging.
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