First Guardian exec’s plan to tap US investors exposed as ASIC probe into alleged ponzi deepens
In First Guardian’s dying days, Falcon Capital director David Anderson hatched a brazen plan to get money from US investors calling on a flashy ‘adviser’ to the ultra wealthy.
When the corporate cop started poking around Paul Chiodo’s Shield Master Fund in late 2023, it set alarm bells off at Falcon Capital and its First Guardian Master Fund.
The timing couldn’t have been worse for Falcon Capital director David Anderson, who was part way through a brazen plan to extricate himself from the funds management world and carve out a hospitality empire.
But the Scotch College-educated Melburnian had a knack for getting out of tight spots. More than that, he got a kick out of skirting legal boundaries and getting away with schemes others wouldn’t dare try to pull off, according to former colleagues and friends.
With ASIC edging closer in early 2024, Falcon Capital, the responsible entity for the now collapsed First Guardian fund, moved to rid itself of property developer Chiodo and other problem loans.
The Australian broke the story of how First Guardian was exposed to Chiodo through one of his property development funds.
An investigation by this masthead also revealed just how close the ties once were between Anderson and Chiodo. That friendship was purely transactional, it turned out.
The breakdown of the relationship in 2021 would eventually have devastating consequences for the 12,000 investors who stand to lose up to $1bn from the Shield and First Guardian collapses.
Anderson’s ticket out
When ASIC effectively shut down Shield in early 2024, Anderson knew he was running out of time.
Through a series of carefully planned moves, he had found his ticket out: a US investment advisory firm that catered to the ultra wealthy and was looking for international private markets exposure.
A month after ASIC pounced on Shield, Falcon Capital did a deal that would see a subsidiary of this US firm, Sphinx Investments, agree to purchase the Chiodo Diversified Property Fund for $94m.
First Guardian put a $94m value on the Chiodo fund but The Australian understands its actual investment in the fund was closer to $20m.
The money from that March 2024 sale is still outstanding and the buyer is, unsurprisingly, refusing to pay.
Enter Evan Thomsen: adviser to the 0.1%
The Australian can now reveal the close links between Sphinx, Anderson and the advisers that tipped thousands of Australians into Shield and First Guardian – and how a handful of US investors are caught up in this scandal.
US wealth specialist Evan Thomsen, who is variously described as an ultra-high net worth adviser, a marketing guru and an IT consultant, is understood to represent a shareholder of Sphinx Investments and one of the firm’s major private backers.
Thomsen, currently based in Italy, also has his own businesses and is listed as chairman of global wealth firm Dominion, a specialist in asset protection and tax elimination for the 0.1 per cent.
“Safekeeping our clients’ wealth is our sole purpose, not the interests, policies, ethics, morals, or values of a permanent set of jurisdictions or its peoples,” Thomsen says in an open letter on Dominion’s website.
“Because we are not jurisdictionally limited, we are not bound by any particular legal system, giving us a nearly unlimited amount of tools.”
But for at least a couple of years from 2020, that same Thomsen worked at AGAT Business, the Queensland-based call centre that pressured investors to put their retirement savings into Shield and First Guardian.
While mostly working remotely, Thomsen would on occasion come to Australia to meet with AGAT and others, including Miller Wealth, one of the advice firms caught up in this sprawling scandal. Thomsen even posted about his trip on LinkedIn, including a photo of a meeting in Miller Wealth’s offices.
Thomsen built relationships with Venture Egg’s Ferras Merhi and Anderson to the point he was involved in their overseas expansion plans. The Australian is not suggesting any wrongdoing by Thomsen or Sphinx Investments.
Before ASIC pounced, Merhi was in the process of setting up marketing firms in the US and Dubai to replicate the success he had with the call centre-advice model that had earned him tens of millions of dollars in Australia.
Thomsen was helping to facilitate this expansion, Merhi told The Australian.
Loans from friends and family
At the same time, Anderson was looking to the US for a pipeline of investor money to put into his new unblemished investment firm, Maleo Asset Management.
But he needed a capital injection to set up his new fund. The money in First Guardian was no longer an option; it was tied up in a range of risky loans and equity investments, and ASIC would soon uncover the Chiodo connection and set its sights on Falcon Capital, Anderson and his co-founder Simon Selimaj.
With that door closed, Anderson tapped a family member for a $1.9m loan which The Australian understands was to come from remortgaging the Andersons’ Phillip Island holiday property.
A second loan would come from longtime friend and business associate Alistaire Paterson, who set up the new Maleo funds that would manage the incoming US money. He tipped in $630,000 in May 2024, days before First Guardian suspended redemptions.
The Australian understands the $630,000 has yet to be repaid.
Paterson’s firm Archer Cast Capital is also understood to be owed a further $500,000 for services provided in setting up Maleo.
Anyone familiar with the Falcon Capital liquidator’s report may recognise Archer Cast Capital; it borrowed $90,000 in a six-year loan from Falcon in January 2024 at the enviable rate of 1 per cent per annum.
US money starts to flow
With Maleo up and running in 2024, the Sphinx connection facilitated by Thomsen, who introduced Anderson and Sphinx founder Josh Curtis, was starting to pay off: the money began to flow into Maleo from Sphinx clients from about September.
A handful of these US wholesale investors handed their money over to Maleo, an Asia-focused fund, in the belief they would get a guaranteed return.
The Australian has seen documents showing that shortly after the investor money was deposited, it was moved out in lump sums even before standard KYC/AML checks had been completed.
Most of the money was moved to a different Maleo entity. It is this entity, Maleo Singapore, that liquidators are currently chasing to recover close to $200m of First Guardian investor money.
The $200m had been tied up in First Guardian loans and investments in Indonesian companies but in 2024, two days after Anderson learned Falcon was under ASIC surveillance, he assigned the loan obligations to Maleo Singapore. To date, Maleo Singapore, which Anderson was also a director of until 2024, has not repaid any of the money owed to Falcon or First Guardian.
A source who spoke on condition of anonymity suggested the US investor money may have been used to pay a handful of First Guardian hardship requests in late 2024 and early 2025 and that this was just a test run; that the real goal was to push more of Sphinx’s wealthy US clients into Maleo so it could be funnelled back into First Guardian, with Australian investors and the regulator none the wiser.
US investors appear to have gotten off lightly. The money they put into Maleo, just $US1.7m between last September and January, is a pittance compared to the $450m Australian investors fear they have lost from the First Guardian scheme.
When contacted by The Australian, the SEC declined to confirm if any investigations were underway.
