Web sleuths hot on the trail of Getswift’s Joel Macdonald; Nike silent over Tame talking points

Disgraced Getswift boss Joel Macdonald has delivered his many enemies a clue on his current location. Picture: Instagram.

The move of former AFL footballer Joel Macdonald to reinvent himself as a YouTube influencer and executive life coach following the disastrous failure of Getswift is nothing if not predictable.

But, while parading his self justifications, the disgraced public company boss has also given his many enemies plenty of clues about his current location.

Macdonald’s 23-minute debut on the video platform, posted in mid May, is long on self justification and a tad short on self reflection.

“I lost $200m. My company went public, peaked at nearly a billion-dollar valuation, and then … it all collapsed. The media turned. Investors sued. Friends disappeared. I became one of the most hated entrepreneurs in Australia and it almost killed me,” says the former Melbourne Demons player in the video’s introduction.

“And then Boom! Everything vanished.”

Who’s to blame, according to Macdonald? Short sellers, the media, regulators who don’t understand the market and the difficulties of doing business while dealing with pesky disclosure rules; all the usual suspects.

As a quick reminder, here’s what Justice Michael Lee said about the collapse of the logistics software company in a 2023 penalty decision delivered 18 months after he handed down a marathon 859-page indictment of the company’s inner workings. It found Getswift broke continuous disclosure rules 22 times, and misleading and deceptive conduct laws on 40 occasions.

“(Getswift) became a market darling because it adopted an unlawful public relations‑driven approach to corporate disclosure instigated and driven by those wielding power within the company,” Justice Lee said.

Among other things, Getswift boasted of signing deals with major national and international corporations, including Amazon and Commonwealth Bank, although they had only agreed to a trial of its software. It failed to disclose the end of other deals it had previously trumpeted to the market.

After ASIC won a landmark case against Getswift, Justice Lee banned Macdonald from acting as a company director for 12 years, and handed down a $1m fine. Fellow Getswift director Bane Hunter copped a 15-year ban and a $2m fine.

Joel Macdonald and Bane Hunter both received substantial bans and fines. Picture: Tom Pietrasik

Macdonald’s self-exculpatory YouTube video won’t come as much of a surprise to the esteemed judge. He noted in 2023 that Macdonald and Hunter had left the country ahead of ASIC’s court case, disappeared with more than $80m into Getswift’s Canadian subsidiary and had done little to defend or explain their actions in the Australian court case.

“Neither Mr Hunter nor Mr Macdonald have shown the slightest degree of remorse or contrition, nor have they made any acknowledgment they behaved improperly,” he said.

“Additionally, ASIC has been unable to explore where all the money raised from investors went.”

That last is the kicker.

Macdonald still has plenty of enemies around the traps in Australia; the shareholders and institutions which lost big on Getswift, as well as business partners such as former teammate James Strauss, whose 2023 lawsuit against Macdonald over a share sale deal struggled to get off the ground because the Getswift boss couldn’t be found.

Margin Call hears that some of Macdonald’s enemies have been busy learning to use geolocation software in the wake of his video confessional, largely set on an apartment balcony against the sweeping backdrop of a mountainous city.

The leading thinkers reckon he’s in the Columbian capital of Bogota, and avid watchers apparently have managed to narrow the search to a handful of possible apartment towers.

“If you’ve ever hit rock bottom – or fear that you will – this is for you,” Macdonald’s video says.

It might also be helpful to a few stray creditors, it appears. NE

Nike’s deafening silence over Tame contract

A week on since Nike first learned that its brand ambassador, Grace Tame, had been sedulously promoting the ravings of terrorist sympathisers and yet we’re still to hear from its corporate shoe dogs on what – if anything – they intend to do in response.

Paralysed by indecision, Nike officials have gone incommunicado since releasing a short statement on Tame earlier this week. It flagged their alarm with her behaviour, spoke of a need for answers from “Grace’s team”, and pushed the old company line of zero tolerance for “any form of discrimination, including anti-Semitism”.

Bold words, but little action, from the Swoosh.

Tame’s crime isn’t her myopic view of an eight-front war that she’s bravely experienced through an algorithm.

Grace Tame. Picture: Chris Kidd

It’s not her talent for reciting Hamas talking points. It’s not even the arrogance on display every time she blasts another lopsided adjudication on this complex region that she’s evidently not visited enough and is pig-ignorant about.

There’s not even any blurry, delicate language that Nike needs to parse from Tame. Their job should be easy. Her Instagram posts contain a slurry of lies about Jewish supremacy, “ethnic cleansing”, “genocide”, and an endorsement of pro-Palestinian maximalist Mohammed el-Kurd, whose statements, published by Tame to her 260,000 followers, thinly condoned the murder of two Jews on the streets of Washington.

It shouldn’t take seven days for Nike to establish that its ambassador is outwardly carrying water for extremists. These are people who aren’t even hiding the fact that they laud the terrorism of October 7, or the concomitant violence being wrought against Jews from the spread of anti-Semitism. Randa Abdel-Fattah, whom Tame shared a stage with last month, and embraced in photographs afterwards, changed her social media profile to a f … king paraglider on the day October 7 happened.

But maybe seven days is just how long it takes for Nike’s people in Oregon to unpick the clauses and subclauses of a legal contract in Australia. We put Tame’s at a ballpark value of $100,000, but it could be a touch more.

A high price to pay for the unchecked expression of one’s warped moral righteousness, or the vaunted glow of virtue, which is just vanity in the end, as Richard Flanagan once superbly pointed out, vanity that’s dressed up and waiting for applause. YB