Snooker champ Quinten Hann banned for leaving investors behind the eight ball

THE corporate regulator has potted former snooker champ Quinten Hann over a forex business he ran with the help of former AFL footy player Mark “The Fridge” Roberts (see Margin Call, October 15).

Federal Court judge Michelle Gordon on Friday blackballed Hann, who these days goes by the name of James Sonny Quinten Hunter, from the financial services industry for four years — or half the ban he copped from snooker back in 2006 after taking a bribe to throw a match.

His business, Monarch FX, told clients interested in its whiz-bang automated trading technology to set up self-managed super funds through The Fridge’s Gold Coast outfit, Breakaway Finance Group.

Sadly, clients typically lost 40 to 50 per cent of their investments, the court heard.

Monarch used to rent a financial services license from Gold Coast-based Avestra — as Margin Call reported on Thursday, that’s the mob who pleaded guilty in Australia’s first ever criminal case under takeovers law.

Avestra was fined $40,000 after neglecting to tell the market funds it managed owned more than half of listed broker AG Financial. It also forgot to mount a takeover bid, as required by law.

Identifying the Crooks

DO you know your Crooks? Clive Palmer’s media adviser, Andrew Crook, was arrested by Queensland police on Friday on suspicion of being involved in the bizarre kidnap of a NAB executive on the Indonesian island of Batam.

He is of course not the same Andrew Crook as the former Crikey reporter, who these days is a student at Cornell University.

Here’s how you tell them apart:

Crook #1

Occupation: spokesman, alleged kidnapper.

Location: not within 100 metres of NAB’s Southport branch, by court order.

Associates: former Gold Coast cop Mick Featherstone.

Appearance: man in a suit with thinning hair.

Says: “I’m currently unavailable…” (answering machine, Friday).

Crook #2

Occupation: student.

Location: snowy Ithaca, upstate New York.

Associates: other students, union activists.

Appearance: tall, has lots of hair.

Says: “I have told my current US employer to stay off Google News for at least 24 hours.”

Board hoarders

COULD outgoing Treasury Secretary Martin Parkinson pop up on a few company boards after leaving the public service this month?

He’s been replaced by investment banker John Fraser, most recently Australian chairman of UBS.

Parkinson, on the other hand, has of late been slamming sections of corporate Australia for wanting company tax cuts and an increase to the GST.

“A lot of what this debate is about is people saying of government, ‘take money from the citizenry at large and give it to me’,” he said at a lunch late last month.

Which is probably not a popular line of thought on the non-executive director circuit.

Cayman conundrum

DID $750,000 reaped from a property development at hippy haven Noosa end up in the Cayman Islands? And if so, how?

These are the questions raised by a recent judgment handed down by the Caribbean tax haven’s Court of Appeal.

The dispute revolved around two sums of money, $810,000 and $US530,000, transferred from a company controlled by Cayman Islands real estate agent Doug Sell to a British Virgin Islands company controlled by property developer William Cassidy back in 2009.

According to Sell, Cassidy was supposed to hold the money and invest it on his behalf. Not so, said Mr Cassidy: he reckoned the dosh was his, the return on investments he made with Mr Sell.

The court heard that back in 1999 Sell invested $500,000 in a development called Noosa Sanctuary, at Noosa Heads, on behalf of an unnamed client.

It wasn’t until August 2007 that Sell got paid, with about $750,000 deposited into his Credit Suisse account in Switzerland.

With interest, this became the $810,000 he claims he put into Cassidy’s account in 2009, along with the US dollar amount, winnings from his real estate business.

Sell claims to have asked Cassidy for the money back in 2010 “by e-mail, telephone and in person when they met in the Cayman Islands”. Lacking satisfaction, in December that year Sell had a formal demand served on Cassidy at the Ritz Carlton, on Grand Cayman’s Seven Mile Beach.

In a 5am email, Cassidy responded that “in the event of any harm coming to my family, property or me”, he would tell the US authorities all about Sell’s Swiss bank accounts, and suggest the Cayman Islands authorities audit him “re possible money laundering”.

According to Cassidy, he repaid Sell’s investment in Noosa in 2001 and Sell actually wanted help hiding assets from his ex-wife.

Sadly, the court preferred Sell’s version of events.

Last month, it ordered Cassidy to pay back the money, plus ­interest.