The courts have finally taken action over allegations that dodgy NDIS housing developer Saorsa Health blew millions of their investors’ cash on loans to directors, Cambodian dairy farms and their own credit card bills.
Not at the behest of the corporate regulator, though.
No, it took Graham Morcom, an aggrieved investor in Saorsa projects – and who has also been stung by David McWilliams’ ALAMMC group – to head to the courts to win freezing orders over the assets of Saorsa founders Aiden Garrison and Will McKellar.
Justice Sarah Derrington granted the orders in the federal court, ordering a freeze on assets of Garrison and McKellar, along with assets of staff and directors of Mountain Assets Partners, the brokers that raised the cash for the projects of both groups.
Those, at least, will be challenged.
Staff and former directors of Mountain Assets were given until June 5 to challenge the orders, and a spokesman for the group told Margin Call the brokers “strongly refute all allegations and will vigorously defend our position”. The company’s directors have previously said they were unaware of misuse of Saorsa money, and were co-operating with ASIC investigations into their affairs before the companies went bust.
Allegations that Saorsa investor funds were siphoned off to a variety of uses were revealed in the first administrator’s report of BRPS administrator David Sampson at the end of February, mind you.
Some $4.3m was spent through Garrison’s company AMEX card over 30 months, and Sampson’s investigations suggest some of that went on paying personal bills. Another $2.4m went out the door in loans to companies that appear to be associated with a dairy farm in Cambodia, and another $1.9m to a solar farm business in New Zealand, of which Garrison was a director and investor.
Work done combing through Sampson’s reports on the Saorsa group by aggrieved investors suggests that almost $17.8m went out the door on loans to directors and related parties.
Sampson’s report is just that, and no court has yet made a finding of wrongdoing, so perhaps there’s a reasonable explanation for all of the above. But the BPRS administrator is still pursuing the matter.
Sampson wouldn’t confirm the total to Margin Call when we made contact, but did confirm that he had sent formal letters of demand to both Garrison and McKellar, which suggests bankruptcy might be looming for both men if they can’t immediately repay the cash.
Twiggy’s oyster troubles
Tough week for Andrew Forrest last week. Fortescue lost another round of senior executives, including co-chief executive officer Mark Hutchinson, and chief operating officer Shelley Robertson.
That’s in the wake of yet another round of culling at the iron ore exporter and would-be green energy player, which included the closure of two hydrogen electrolyser manufacturing plants in the US and Australia.
Now, on top of that, a batch of dodgy oysters has spoiled the month for Forrest’s WA aquaculture company, after the discovery of elevated E. coli levels forced the recall of some of the week’s production.
Andrew and Nicola Forrest’s Harvest Road owns the aquaculture operation, just outside of Albany on WA’s South Coast.
Not the best look for a company that has long boasted that the cool waters around the country town make it the ideal place to grow oysters. But a spokesman for the company assured Margin Call on Monday the bad batch was only a minor blip, worth about 8 per cent of the week’s harvest, and it was the first time the company had been forced to issue a recall – in an industry where they are not uncommon.
Harvest Road contacted wholesalers that were sent the product as soon as the company received the test results, he said. Most oysters didn’t make it to market, and there have been no reports of illness.
Not the first hiccup at the aquaculture business, though, bought by the Forrest family in 2020.
The oyster farm was briefly closed down in late 2023 after a parasite infestation, and over-estimating the demand for akoya oysters – a local delicacy, but not well known on the east coast – led to allegations that tonnes of excess stock was dumped at a local tip in early 2024.
Party-pooper hack job but who’s really blowing Palmer’s trumpet?
Clive Palmer’s having a hard enough time closing his Trumpet of Patriots, but it’s emerged it and his old UAP have been hit by a massive data hack of their members, raising issues of liability.
$100m Victorian government IT bungle causes water bill chaos
Pity the thousands of customers of Victorian government-owned Greater Western Water, who haven’t received a bill for more than a year due to a botched IT system ‘upgrade’ that cost taxpayers millions.