Liquidators chase former AFL boss Andrew Demetriou over Acquire Learning payments
Ex-AFL boss Andrew Demetriou is facing court action, with liquidators chasing him to the Federal Court over payments made to a failed company he was linked to.
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Former AFL boss Andrew Demetriou has been named in an ongoing legal battle over the collapse of an education business, Acquire Learning.
Mr Demetriou is facing court action taken by the liquidators of Acquire, who filed the action at the Federal Court this week against his family trust. They are attempting to obtain payments made to him while he was involved with Acquire.
The case has not yet been assigned to a judge and a hearing date not set, although that could be confirmed this week.
Acquire Learning was receiving hundreds of millions of dollars of federal government funding after it positioned itself as a “broker” that sold courses from a range of vocational training provider
The Herald Sun reported last year Demetriou was never registered with the corporate regulator as a director of Acquire, but he was chairman of the company’s advisory board between February 2014 and June 2016 – earning $900,000 a year for the three-day-a-week advisory role.
In February last year, Demetriou was questioned in the Supreme Court over the nature of his advisory role to Acquire.
He told the court he had little knowledge of its financial affairs.
Mr Demetriou described his role as “primarily to open doors” and to “use my network of contacts”. He said he was also a “sounding board for a young group of people wanting to start a business”.
The Australian Consumer and Competition Commission took Acquire to court over the use of its Hawthorn call centre and the way it targeted students. In 2017, the ACCC won the case and Acquire was fined $4.5 million.
The judgment said Acquire, in its use of telemarketers “rorted” the scheme, and that its “activities resembled those of an unscrupulous fly-by-night operation rather than those of a prominent and market-leading provider of student recruitment services, as it describes itself”.
The company then went into voluntary administration in May 2017, owing creditors more than $100 million.
It found its funding cut off by the federal government which began to reform the way it financed the sector.
Mr Demetriou did not respond to a Herald Sun request for comment.
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