$400m sting: Papas, Westpac and Wall Street’s wolf
How a former photocopier and printing salesman worked his way up to be at the centre of an alleged fraud taking in the nation’s biggest bank and global sports powerhouse Liverpool FC.
Friends and colleagues of Bill Papas still talk about the time he brought Jordan Belfort in to motivate his sales staff on a memorable day that ended with Papas and his team out on the town with the man famously dubbed “the Wolf of Wall Street”.
About a decade ago, just before Leonardo DiCaprio would portray Belfort in a memorable movie full of hedonistic scenes mixed with financial fraud, Belfort had travelled to Sydney to appear at motivational conferences.
Belfort was “paid an exorbitant amount of money” to come to Papas’s office to present to his sales team, according to one witness. Papas, Belfort and the team would end up having a huge night out among scenes still talked about in wonderment today by those present or others in the office who didn’t score an invite.
Papas, now the centre of $400m fraud allegations that have enthralled corporate Australia and involved big banks Westpac, Societe Generale, Japan’s SMBC Leasing and Finance, as well as National Australia Bank, has long been known for his partying and spending habits, several sources say.
“His teams would be out partying, spending lots of money. They lived hard, partied hard,” one colleague of the Forum Finance boss told The Weekend Australian.
“He is charismatic and he is a fantastic salesperson. He liked to do things big; he liked to be noticed and live the rockstar lifestyle. He would travel around the world at the pointy end of the plane, take clients out on Sydney Harbour on expensive yachts. Some would be for wine and cheese, some would be for ... more.”
Papas, also known as Basile Papadimitriou, would go on to establish the Forum Group of Companies which at one stage was turning over $100m annually, and strike sponsorship deals with one of the famous soccer clubs in the world, English Premier League giant Liverpool.
He would even gain the commercial rights to Liverpool’s next tour of Australia and have his food waste dispenser machines installed at Liverpool’s iconic home ground Anfield.
Besides the equipment leasing arm Forum Finance, Papas’s many entities covered business interests across GPS Asset Tracking, UV-C disinfection systems, commercial solar and energy and the waste digester machines.
Papas would spend $15m to buy Greek soccer team Xanthi, and use the sport as a way to expand his business in Europe, including agreements with popular German team Schalke.
They were heady days for the former photocopier and printing salesman who had also run a trucking business before starting Forum in 2011 and overseeing acquisitions worth tens of millions of dollars to build a group that would employ hundreds of staff.
Papas enjoyed the trappings of business success, upgrading a new Audi performance car to race in the GT World Challenge Racing series in Victoria and South Australia in May.
“Because of the fun of racing ... we decided to take the race to the next level and take the GT class seriously,” Papas told a motoring website.
For now at least, that lifestyle appears to be in the past as Papas faces accusations of one for the biggest frauds in recent Australian business history.
The civil legal actions are in the Federal Court and the NSW Police are investigating after the matter was referred to them by Westpac and several other parties.
Papas is holed up in Greece, where he claims to have caught Covid-19 and has been unable to board a return flight to Australia or comply with Federal Court orders.
The Federal Court and Justice Michael Lee only learned of the Covid-19 test result on Thursday, when it was submitted to the court to explain Papas’s whereabouts.
Before Papas’s test result, he failed to comply with court orders including an instruction to file an affidavit of his assets.
He missed a meeting in Perth in mid-June citing health issues and Westpac was unable to locate him until it was mentioned in court that he was in Greece and planning to return.
Papas did not respond to requests for comment for this story.
The allegations against Papas and the Forum entities relate, in some instances, to forged invoices and signatures for equipment lease agreements that were not signed off by customers, including Veolia Environmental Services.
An affidavit filed by Veolia finance chief Gurpreet Brar, who has been appointed to lead the firm’s Indian operations, highlighted a complex web of potential fraud.
“The signatures purporting to be mine on the notices of assignment and the attached payment schedules, and certificates of acceptance, are not mine,” he said in the document. “My handwritten name on the notice of assignment dated 8 March 2021, is also not my handwriting.”
In other instances it is alleged Forum received bank funding to buy equipment such as printers to lease, but the goods were never purchased and Forum would continue to make payments to conceal any wrongdoing.
Seven Group-owned WesTrac in late May was informed that funds had been accessed from a Westpac loan facility in its name. WesTrac had no record of having accessed the funds, but did not suffer a financial loss.
Court documents also refer to Forum Finance customers including ALH Group, Scentre Shopping Centre Management, Coles Supermarkets and Catholic Healthcare.
Foreign affairs
His vast empire – which includes assets in Greece, Britain and the United Arab Emirates, as well as Australia – is now the subject of an international asset freezing order as Westpac seeks to follow the money trail and find the missing $294m.
Westpac is also forensically analysing Forum Finance and related-entity bank accounts to determine who was behind some of the questionable transactions.
The international freezing order could involve Xanthi, the second division Greek soccer team Papas owns. On Thursday, the Federal Court in Sydney was told of several payments totalling $4.4m for Xanthi FC that appear to have ultimately come via Forum companies.
Reports by Greek news outlets, translated by The Weekend Australian, show Papas injected €9.5m ($15.01m) into Xanthi last September when he bought about 94 per cent of the club. He installed high-profile A-League coach and former Socceroo Tony Popovic, only to sack him months later. His assistant was former Socceroos goalkeeper Zjelko Kalac.
When approached by The Weekend Australian to comment about Papas and Xanthi, Kalac, now in Croatia, said he “didn’t want to get involved in the shitshow”.
Xanthi is preparing for the upcoming 2021-22 season, this week recruiting three young players from Sydney Olympic – Mohamed Adam, Fabian Monge and Matthew Scarcella – who left Australia on Wednesday. Olympic is the state league team Papas was president of until Westpac first revealed details of the fraud in early July, and he has been backing it to the tune of about $500,000 annually.
Xanthi also made headlines in Greece about two years ago when it was revealed Russian-Greek billionaire Ivan Savvidis owned it and a rival club PAOK, in contravention of league rules.
Xanthi recently appointed Jamie Monroy as its new manager. Monroy was recently on the coaching staff at English team Leeds United and is a former Sydney Olympic coach.
Papas was a regular attendee at Olympic games at its Peter Moore Field in Belmore in Sydney’s west, watching junior matches – his sons play in junior teams – from a seat near the club canteen.
He is said to have been scouring for talent that could be sent to Europe to Xanthi. Olympic has also long had a player development agreement with popular German club Schalke, which in 2018 announced a three-year sponsorship deal with Papas and his then Orca Enviro Systems, which would see an Orca food digester system installed at the Veltins Arena in Germany’s northwest. The deal, which included Orca advertising, was set to expire this year. A Schalke spokesman declined to comment.
The Orca waste dispensers would form the basis of Forum’s growth. Papas started the group in 2011, providing print management, fleet and IT solutions to customers. He would make a series of bolt-on acquisitions and in 2016 became the exclusive distributor of the Orca dispensers in Australia, New Zealand and Britain.
One Sydney business executive remembers Papas showing him in the system in the Intercontinental Hotel in Sydney – “Bill was very charismatic and confident” – and talking of expansion plans into Europe.
The Orca dispensers would be placed in hotels, stadiums and even the office of Sydney tech giant Canva and about 15 Coles supermarkets, where they still remain. The machines are meant to “digest” food waste, turning it into water that flow into sewage systems.
Kicking goals
But the biggest deal in soccer, Papas had was with soccer giant Liverpool, which broke a 30-year drought to win the EPL in mid-2020. Papas clinched a sponsorship deal with the club in February last year, including having a food waste dispenser under the Papas brand Iugis installed at Anfield.
Papas is understood to have been paying up to $1.5m annually to Liverpool via his Iugis UK Limited, rather than Forum.
Papas is said to have even had first right of refusal to be the promoter of the next Liverpool tour of Australia. The club famously played before 96,000 spectators in Melbourne in 2013 and is more popular with Australian soccer fans than other English clubs.
Yet it is understood Papas has not paid Liverpool any sponsorship instalments this year. A Liverpool spokesman told The Weekend Australian: “The club does not discuss commercial matters of this sort but can confirm it has suspended its partnership with Iugis UK.”
But by the time of the Liverpool deal, Papas was facing problems with his business empire.
“A company affiliated with Bill Papas entered into a distribution agreement with Orca Digesters, primarily in Australia, New Zealand, and the UK, from 2016 until the agreement was terminated in early 2020,” says its North America-based chief executive Louis Anagnostakos. “Our ongoing focus, both before this emergent situation and since, is continuity of service for ORCA Digester customers so that they can continue to divert food waste from landfills – leading to less garbage trucks and less greenhouse gases. Orca is a meaningful part of our customer’s sustainability initiatives and we have put in place a dedicated team to support Orca installations in Australia.”
While Anagnostakos would not comment, it is alleged Papas may have owed Orca money and strayed into territories not covered by his agreement.
Financial documents lodged with the corporate regulator show the Forum Group of Companies suffering a $40m drop in revenue in the 2020 financial year to about $57m, though a $5.7m net profit had been recorded. Forum’s revenue had been as high as $101m in 2018, when it had made a $5m acquisition and paid off a $6.7m loan. In 2020, Forum had bought Smartprint Fleet Management for $4.5m cash but sold Forum Enviro Pty Ltd for $5m according to its financial accounts. Forum Enviro is a business started by Papas and seemingly ultimately owned by the wider Forum group.
Padlocks have been added to the external gates of Papas’s home in Sydney’s Rozelle in the past week, and evil eye charms adorn the property.
Mati charms – which feature heavily in several Mediterranean cultures, including Greek, to ward off evil – were hanging from the front and side door when The Weekend Australian visited.
The Rozelle property is owned by Papas’s fellow Forum Finance director and third respondent in the Westpac case Vincenzo Tesoriero.
While Melbourne-based Tesoriero claims to have resigned as a Forum Finance director, corporate filings do not reflect that, and he is caught up in the action.
The Federal Court this week heard Westpac has hired private investigators at one stage to follow Papas and Tesoriero, including to a destination where they were racing Audis.
Papas’s LinkedIn profile lists motivation guru Tony Robbins, Telstra CEO Andrew Penn and former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull among his influences.
His profile also says he is a father of three, a “football fanatic and motorsport enthusiast”, and has a personal passion for environment change and reducing landfill.
He was known to attend events held by the Hellenic Initiative Australia, a not-for-profit organisation uniting Greek Australians and philhellenes in efforts to help the country’s recovery.
It seems, though, Papas didn’t expect to be in the firing line of one of Australia’s biggest banks.
Prior to Westpac confronting him about financial discrepancies in customer accounts on June 11, he was planning renovations on his house and bought a new holiday pad on the Central Coast.
Additional reporting: David Ross
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