David McWilliams’ ALAMMC Developments blew NDIS housing funds on ‘cars, casino, crypto’

The Brisbane office of David McWilliams' NDIS housing developer ALAMMC was fitted out with sporting memorabilia, basketball court, and games. Inset: David McWilliams.

Supercars, cryptocurrency, a Fijian resort, signed basketball jumpers and a country pub. That’s how one dodgy NDIS housing provider spent investor cash, instead of the promised houses for people with dis­abilities.

We’re talking about David McWilliams’ ALAMMC Developments group, which raised more than $90m from investors before it was put into court-ordered receivership last year after Queensland gambling regulators tipped off ASIC that McWilliams had punted some $39m over the tables at Star ­Casino.

Receivers Andrew Fielding and Helen Newman from BDO delivered their first report on ALAMMC to the court in late February, but a redacted version has only just been made available to the public.

Like fellow Queensland NDIS housing boondoggle Saorsa Health, the ALAMMC report shows a damning picture of the wild west of NDIS housing investment, where dodgy developers have been allowed to roam free and prey on investors – promising 45 per cent returns for doing good, but delivering nothing in return.

The BDO report is heavily redacted as ASIC is still investigating key parts of the group’s financing and operations – including McWilliams’ relationship with Saorsa Health boss Aiden Garrison. They were once co-directors of a company, according to ASIC records.

But even if the worst bits remain behind a veil of secrecy, there’s still plenty to outrage investors who punted their savings on McWilliams’ promises of extraordinary returns for investing in housing for people with disabilities.

The ALAMMC group was supposed to be building dozens of units for people with special needs. The group raised almost $92m, promising investors they’d get 10 per cent interest a year, plus a bonus 15 per cent when the property was built and sold off.

Instead McWilliams and his wife, Laura Fullarton, splashed cash on a lifestyle most of their retired investors could only dream of.

Companies in the group bought supercars – a McLaren 720S coupe, worth a cool half-million new, an Aston Martin F1, and a Porsche 718.

There’s also an “office” in a light industrial area on the Gold Coast, decked out with a basketball court, signed jerseys from NBA stars such as Shaquille O’Neal, and video game consoles. It wasn’t used for client meetings, of course.

“Not commensurate with a sophisticated property development business,” sniffed the BDO report.

ALAMMC also “invested” $6.8m in a Fijian resort development. It’s possible that would have eventually helped give NDIS participants a place to go on holiday, but Margin Call has its doubts. The place was never built, according to the BDO report, so the question is largely moot.

McWilliams also sent $3.3m to cryptocurrency brokers which BDO is still trying to recover, bought $3m worth of shares in Canadian-registered Green Data, invested another $2m in Seychelles-registered Titan Litigation Partners, $600,000 into a Gold Coast based modelling agency, and – for reasons not entirely clear to Margin Call – a signed Ed Sheeran guitar.

The group also lent $4m to McWilliams, another $1.3m to “Laura”, and bought a pub in Whyalla, through a company run by McWilliams and his son, Bailey.

None of which, to be completely clear, was disclosed to investors in the documents they signed before handing over their hard-earned cash.

The family doesn’t even run the pub. It’s been leased out to someone else, with the rent payments only just enough to cover the mortgage.

BDO’s investigations also reveal that McWilliams had an extensive collection of counterfeit watches. It’s not clear whether the businessman thought they were real and was himself ripped off along the way, or whether they were just bling designed to impress mug punters about the success of his business. But McWilliams once listed jewellery worth $280,000 among his assets.

Having said that, the BDO report is just a report, and McWilliams may have perfectly reasonable explanations for all of the above.

But realistically, investors will be lucky to get cents on their dollar when the assets are sold off. NE

A law unto themselves

Have you been following the ripping scandal tearing its way through BlackBay Lawyers, the Sydney firm that fired two of its litigators, sued them, then found out that both were a backstabbing pair of antisemites and casual misogynists of the highest order?

Justin Carroll and Yianni Van Gelden. They’re the ex-employees who thrived off a kind of Jew-hatred normally reserved for the foulest corners of the internet. Using WhatsApp, they ridiculed “Jew” clients, the “Holohoax”, claimed that Jews “monitor everyone on social media” and worried about OpenAI because its CEO, Sam Altman, “is a Jew”.

Nor do they hold women in particularly high esteem, according to a piece published on the front page of The Australian on Monday. “Most women are not cold-bloodedly rational,” said Carroll, who was a partner at the firm. “No way,” said Van Gelder, “that’s why they aren’t leaders usually.”

“Or killers,” Carroll said back. Wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

Maybe Carroll has never heard of Katherine Knight, or Rebecca Butterfield, or the very disturbing case of Jessica Camilleri. But this is what happens when instead of reading James Phelps’ Green is The New Black, which chronicles the hardest women in Australian prisons, one drinks way too deeply from the horn of Andrew Tate. You, essentially, become a very confused ignoramus.

Former Blackbay Lawyers partner Justin Carroll, left, and Yianni Van Gelder.

BlackBay rightfully terminated Carroll and Van Gelder’s employment in February (over unrelated matters) only to find itself facing questions of its own last week as to why it hadn’t acted sooner against them – or at least against Carroll.

Complaints had been filed a year earlier about Carroll’s conduct on LinkedIn concerning his posts about Jews and the war in Gaza. BlackBay’s official LinkedIn account even gave Carroll a “like” on one of these posts, although who knows if that was just Carroll commandeering the account to praise his own work. The “like” was removed over the weekend.

Ugly, yes. A crisis? Quite. Good thing that one of BlackBay’s many offerings is the loathsome job of crisis management. We suspect that’s why the firm snapped up former Channel 7 reporter Liam Cox as its head of client growth two months ago. Cox was the “head of crisis” for Wilkinson Butler, and presumably he knows how to switch hats during a spot of bother. And he’s had a few.

Cox left Wilkinson Butler in a hurry last year after he came up against an inconvenience with the NSW Police Force, officers charging him in May with allegedly choking and assaulting a woman and allegedly leaving her hospitalised.

Those charges remain on foot; he’s on bail for assault occasioning actual bodily harm, two counts of common assault and intentionally choking without consent, with the matter listed for mention later this year. These are just charges, of course. Nothing proven. Nothing that prohibits Cox from working with a group of reputational specialists, as awkward as that might look.

But it’s also curious, isn’t it, that within this small, female-dominated firm – 16 women, five men – you have Cox hired while on bail for DV offences and, until recently, there was Van Gelder in their midst. He’s facing five charges of domestic assault that are scheduled to be heard on May 16.

All of which causes us to wonder about BlackBay’s hiring policies. Here we have the crisis specialists boasting of their expertise in reputational management while their own people are reporting in at the local cop shop once or twice a week.

It only speaks to our confusion that Van Gelder wasn’t stood down over his DV offences. He remained on the books for another nine months, and when he was finally ditched, it was for allegedly pilfering IP and seeking to establish a competitive firm.

Not that those plans to set up a rival firm are going all that swimmingly. Late last week, amid all this publicity, Van Gelder dumped his 49 shares in Carroll Van Gelder Lawyers Pty Ltd, the entity he hoped to start with Carroll. A signal, we take it, that he’s viewing the non-compete stipulations of his exit a bit more seriously. YB