United Petroleum founders Avi Silver and Eddie Hirsch behind smear of rival petrol station OTR

United Petroleum chief David David Szymczak. United Petroleum has been revealed as behind a smear campaign behind a rival petrol service station empire.

Two sets of billionaires, a bitter fight over petrol, and a bombshell revelation exposed in a South Australian courtroom.

It’s a tale that begins at the height of the Covid-19 lockdowns, in 2020, when rich-listers Avi Silver and Eddie Hirsch – the Israeli co-founders of United Petroleum – discovered that South Australian competitor OTR was attempting to muscle into their turf in Victoria.

Until just a few months ago, OTR had been owned by the Shahins, a Lebanese-Palestinian family whose empire of service stations – trading on low volume, higher-priced fuel – directly imperilled United’s wafer thin margins. OTR was started by Fathi Shahin in the 1980s and his three sons – Yasser, Khalil and Samer – later took over the business.

Avi Silver. Picture: David Geraght

The mere prospect of OTR pushing into Victoria terrified the executives at United.

Under pressure to act, and convinced his business would struggle to compete, United CEO David Szymczak turned to the corporate strategists at Civic Group, paying them more than $100,000 over a year to mount a media campaign against the South Australian fuel company.

Former Civic executive David Lau, who was terminated by the firm, has been alleged in court to have deployed underhanded tactics to meet his objectives.

This included setting up a Facebook group – OTR Survivors – and publishing fabricated posts purporting to be from disgruntled former OTR employees complaining about their conditions.

None of these were real accounts, and when the Shahin family unmasked him as the source of their woes, they sued The Civic Group in the Federal Court.

But until Wednesday morning, any notion that United had paid for this campaign remained entirely a mystery. Civic Group had managed to keep United’s name a secret, and this is largely what prompted OTR to pursue the firm in the first place — to unmask their client’s identity.

OTR’s Khalil Shahin.

OTR’s Sam Shahin. Picture: Emma Brasier

That effort has now proved successful, with OTR simultaneously agreeing on Wednesday to drop its case against Civic Group – litigation that was ostensibly mounted over a minor point of copyright infringement – just as United’s name was finally made public. It now remains to be seen whether OTR will proceed with further litigation against their rival rich-listers.

United’s concern all along had been a matter of business: that in addition to the increased competition and OTR’s pricing model, the Shahin family’s additional edge in the Victorian market was in its proven underpayment of workers.

In April, the Fair Work Ombudsman found OTR guilty of stealing $2.3m in entitlements from 1,500 of its employees. Two years earlier, OTR agreed to pay $5.8m to settle a case of worker underpayment, and in 2020 the company was ordered to pay $65,000 over the “deliberate exploitation” of a worker.

The company has since been acquired by ASX-listed Viva Energy for $1.2bn, a transaction completed on March 28, one day after the case against Civic Group was lodged, and which resulted in the resignations of Khalil , Samer and Yasser from the OTR board.