No tragedy as Forum boss Bill Papas settles into life at Greek home

One of Australia’s most notorious businessmen is holed up in a northern Greek luxury seaside apartment, socialising with guests.

Forum founder Bill Papas on his balcony in Thessaloniki on the weekend.

In the end it was the arrival of mystery visitors, perhaps some family, that exposed the exact whereabouts of Westpac’s most wanted man Bill Papas.

The 49-year-old Australian boss of Forum Finance had allegedly been in hiding in one of four Thessaloniki residences registered with his Greek company, Mazcon Investments Hellas, refusing to answer knocks on his video camera-secured front door, his blinds tightly drawn on all sides, ignoring messages to his phone and written notes left under the welcome mat.

Papas has good reason to be wary of those he doesn’t know, for the Australian Federal Court is getting weary of his excuses about not being able to answer questions about his various activities, from Iugis to the Forum Group, the alleged fake signatures on Westpac bank documents that secured hundreds of millions of dollars, and the whereabouts of even more seven-figure sums from Japanese lender Sumitomo and the French bank Societe Generale.

Even here on the other side of the world, distant from Australia’s lockdown frustrations, with Greek life carrying on as normal, Papas has been keeping a low profile.

Cafes in the upmarket neighbourhood, above.

This is a region he knows well, with Thessaloniki the biggest city near his family village, Emmanouil Pappas, where he is also known as Vassilis Papadimitriou or Basile Papadimitriou. This northern Greek city was to be the global hub of Papas’s food waste solutions empire, from where he would shuttle to the now-empty Charlotte Street, London office after a listing on the London Stock Exchange.

As part of the image-building veneer and to indulge in a lifelong love of sports, Papas even bought a Greek super league club Xanthi for $15m last August.

But Papas, the former “football-crazy” chair of the Sydney Olympic club, hasn’t even been seen at a match, a training pitch or football function of Xanthi, which is just two hours drive away.

Part of that could be the tight restrictions on Australians leaving the country, although once the banks began asking questions about his extraordinary ruse of allegedly forging signatures of company executives and witnesses on various loans, the Sydneysider managed to get on a plane to Europe sometime in June.

The only Xanthi event Papas has been associated with was back in October when he was unveiled as the new overseas owner. He smiled via a web hook-up from Sydney, signing up former Socceroo Tony Popovic briefly as coach.

Popovic and another Australian coach, Zeljko “spider” Kalac, also an ex-Socceroo goalkeeper, would later say they didn’t want to talk about “this shit show’’ after being forced out at Xanthi. Behind the scenes, the club’s fans say the spending on players was “excessive’’ after Papas took control.

This week, one Thessaloniki neighbour told us they had seen Papas’s shoes outside the door, but not the man, at the swish multimillion-euro apartment on Megalou Alexandrou Street before adding: “But we know what we have read, this notoriety.”

A meeting at Papas’s apartment, above.

At the office address of his food waste company Iugus, a 20-minute walk away, overlooking a tree-lined boulevard of chic coffee shops and bars, fellow tenants say Papas hadn’t been seen “since the start of (northern hemisphere) summer”. Papas has sworn to the court he arrived in Greece on June 21 – a week before Westpac reported the alleged fraud to the NSW Police.

He then claims to have caught Covid-19 on July 5, preventing his return to Australia. However, he now appears fit and well, especially with girlfriend Louise Agostino having also obtained an exit exemption to be by his side and calm his anxiety.

With some irony, Papas’s seventh floor Iugus office, firmly locked with no one answering, shares the floor with a bailiff on one side and a legal firm on the other. Down the corridor is the local bureau of the Greek newspaper website Grtimes.gr.

Having such nosy neighbours might have been a bit too close for comfort for Papas, a man Federal Court Justice Michael Lee says was involved in a “long-running, calculated and elaborate fraud that would rank high in the ­catalogue of corporate misfeasance”.

The banks believe the scale and audacity of the alleged con make it one of Australia’s biggest.

Those Papas is accused of swindling include companies like Humm Group, Veolia Environmental Services, Coles, Australian Leisure and Hospitality Group, Scentre Shopping Centre Management, Radio Rentals and Catholic Healthcare.

The alleged elaborate scheme was uncovered by the banks in May and June this year when they confirmed that more than 100 loan documents had been submitted with allegedly forged signatures. Their initial fears that it involved tens of millions of dollars have now skyrocketed into the hundreds of millions.

For several days here in Greece, the intercom at Papas’s waterfront apartment was answered by a woman insisting that she had never heard of Papas and claiming we most definitely had the wrong address.

That was until a man who bore a family resemblance arrived for a Saturday meeting at this very same address.

The Papadimitriou look-a-like, who was with a blonde companion, went up to Papas’s apartment. Within minutes they were joined by two other mystery men, Ms Agostino and Papas, and they spilled onto the spacious fifth-floor balcony overlooking the deep blue water of the Aegean Sea.

A bespectacled man in a white shirt would occasionally lean over to the others, while Papas slunk deep into his chair in the furthest reach of the balcony.

All the while at street level a couple of interesting characters on motorbikes were busy taking pictures of us taking pictures.

Papas has other worries apart from any subpoena emanating from the Australian legal developments, NSW police inquiries or smiling for the camera.

In recent days the Larissa football club owner Alexis Kougias, also known as Greece’s highest-profile lawyer, has lodged an official complaint against Papas.

Kougias has told the Greek Commission for Money Laundering: “The great criminal, swindler Bill Papas and his colleague Giamouridis used Xanthi to launder 15,000,000 dollars, stolen from the banks.’’

Kougias will also turn to the Professional Sport Committee, which oversaw and approved Papas’s purchase of Xanthi in October last year from Christos Panopoulos – a car importer at the helm of the club for more than three decades who attracted the great Pele to open the club’s stadium.

Panopoulos said he sold the club despite being cleared in a media investigation that alleged he was the front person for one of the country’s Russian-connected dynasties, the Savvides family, which owns rival football club Paok.

Ivan Savvides attracted world headlines in 2018 when he stormed onto the football pitch, objecting to a decision against his Paok club while wearing a gun in his waistband.

Kougias, who was deeply suspicious of Papas last year when he first heard about the new Australian owner who had never even been to Xanthi, said he would co-operate with the Australian authorities to reveal information about Papas.

Papas has installed one of his business associates, Tasos Giamouridis, the owner of a sign-making company in Sindos just outside Thessaloniki, as the chief executive of Xanthi, and Giamouridis owns 1 per cent of Papas’ investment company.

Westpac claims that Giamouridis – who had no previous sports management experience before being handed the reins of the football club – has received about $10.7m from one of Papas’s companies. The bank is looking to freeze his assets.

In a Greek interview when he took control of the club, Giamouridis said he first met Papas in 2018 when he began manufacturing food waste machines for Iugus.

“And from there began a nice friendship and a nice experience that evolves,’’ Giamouridis said.

The Giamouridis factory in nearby Sindos is branded “Iugus Giamouridis’’ in huge letters across the front of the building, loudly linking Papas’s company with his own.

While Papas told the Federal Court, through his lawyer, that he had sold Mazcon Investments Hellas, official Greek records have not been altered.

The General Commercial Register records a Vassilis Papadimitriou as the main shareholder of Mazcon Investments Hellas with more than €5m in share capital.

Officials at the Xanthi club refuse to confirm who their owner is, simply saying: “It’s sensitive’”.

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