Buttrose kid Andrew Spira tries his hand at a million-dollar raise

Lizzie Buttrose and Andrew Spira.

Self-described entrepreneur Andrew Spira isn’t known for much, but if you Google his name a torrent of newspaper articles will pop up and chronicle a shady and riotous criminal history, in NSW and the Northern Territory, accompanied by a multitude of guilty pleas to fraud offences.

So he’s a bit notorious, and if he’s known for anything else it’s his kinship with former ABC chair Ita Buttrose. Spira is the son of Ita’s niece, Lizzie Buttrose, a “D-lister”, as she calls herself now, and a designation only slightly more charitable than what the papers dubbed her for more than a decade: “socialite”, which is just shorthand for rich, drunken, vacuous layabout.

With his track record of good behaviour bonds, community correction orders and a thwarted plan to start a drug-trafficking enterprise in East Timor (where he also hatched a scheme to raise a militia), Spira is obviously a person to whom any serious investor would want to lend their money.

Better him than Jon Adgemis, anyway.

As it happens, Spira is seeking $10m for Skyecap, a lender he founded shortly after pleading guilty to a series of fraud offences and other criminality in Darwin Local Court in November 2023. Having narrowly avoided jail on that occasion, he went on to plead guilty to more charges of fraud: this time for using stolen credit card information to book a bed and breakfast in the Hunter Valley.

Spira wants this funding in $1m allocations, according to a credit pack distributed by Sequoia Financial Group. You have to wonder why Sequoia got itself into bed here with Spira and provided him with this air of legitimacy, or why it would try to entice investors to enter his very uncertain orbit. Late on Monday, Sequoia moved quickly to distance itself from Skyecap altogether.

“Once Sequoia’s corporate finance team was shown the term sheet, the investment committee advised the investment was not approved,” a spokesperson said. “No Sequoia adviser participated in the raise.” So it was actually the term sheet that killed the deal, not the litany of criminal offending. Whichever way they cut it, Sequoia’s name was on the email branded “investment opportunity” mailed out to investors. Fess up, boys.

But even without Spira’s chequered past, the credit pack still looks suspect. The booklet is top-and-tailed with AI-generated photographs of people standing-in as Skyecap clients. If they’re not real, you have to wonder what else is made up.

And what are we to make of Skyecap’s five-member senior management team, with their featureless LinkedIn profiles, paucity of digital footprints and domiciles in the Central Luzon region of the Philippines?

Spira’s ownership of Skyecap is 75 per cent, the remainder belonging to Daniel Agius, the company’s chief operating officer. Both listed glowing biographies of themselves, as you’d expect, and Spira’s is naturally bereft of his run-ins with the law.

Including the time he tried to leave Australia on a false passport, a truly unnecessary venture, because not only did he have a working passport but he also had permission to leave the country, even while out on bail for a domestic violence matter.

“(Mr Spira was) probably one of the first people to use a fake passport to get out of Australia, while holding their real passport with no restraints on that passport,” his lawyer Nicholas Goodfellow said at the time.

So maybe he’s famous, or infamous, for something else after all.