Sacked executive Kent Quinlan claims insider trading

One of Queensland’s most successful businessmen Trevor St Baker and his son Philip have been hit with a law suit from a former executive.

Trevor St. Baker at Brisbane’s Post Office Square in August. Picture: Glenn Hunt

One of Queensland’s most successful businessmen, power baron Trevor St Baker, and his son Philip have been hit with a law suit from a former executive claiming he was sacked after exposin­g corporate misconduct at the publicly listed company they once ran.

Kent Quinlan, a former executive of ERM Power — the energy company founded by Mr St Baker and bought out last year by Shell for $620m — filed civil action in Brisbane’s Supreme Court on Friday alleging he had unearthed insider trading and “sham trans­act­ions” before losing his job in 2014.

Founder of ERM Power Trevor St Baker with his son Philip.

A former chief financial officer of ERM’s gas division, Mr Quinlan said the company — which listed in 2010 and became one of Australia’s biggest electricity suppliers — had inflated its profits by $7m in 2012 through a series of allegedly fictitious deals enabling executives to reap bigger bonuses.

It is alleged that one of the “sham transactions” was with the state-owned Stanwell Corpora­tion, Queensland’s largest electricity generator.

Mr Quinlan also claims that Philip St Baker, a long-time managin­g director and chief executive of ERM Power, was involved in insider trading with the purchase of shares in another company of which ERM had become its biggest shareholder.

In documents filed in the Queensland Supreme Court, Mr Quinlan claims Mr St Baker, through a family trading account, had bought “a significant number of shares” in then Perth-based joint-venture company Empire Oil & Gas in 2013.

Mr Quinlan, who briefly served as acting chief executive of Empire in 2014, alleged that Mr St Baker had critical information about the smaller company’s willingness to agree to an executive restructure — which had been publicly opposed — before buying the shares.

Mr Quinlan also alleges that he suspected a “member of the immediate family” of Philip St Baker may have “engaged in substantial insider trading” in buying a large parcel of shares in gas explorer Metgasco in 2013.

Trevor St Baker, who founded ERM Power in the 1980s and stepped down as chairman in 2011 while remaining a director until 2017, is not specifically named over the alleged­ “sham transactions” or insider trading.

But Mr St Baker, a major Liberal National Party donor, is named as a defendant to the legal action, alongside his son, Philip, and a number of other executives.

In a statement, Mr St Baker said: “It was a standard retrenchment and it’s disappointing that he hasn’t moved on to another position­ like we all have to in circumstances like these. There was no element of whistleblowing involved­.”

In his lawsuit, Mr Quinlan, who worked for ERM Power between 2008 and 2014, said he first raised his concerns as a “whistleblower” with executives in 2012.

“As a consequence of the said divulgations, Mr Quinlan was victimised by a litany of retaliatory conduct, over a period of some seven years from 2012 to 2019,’’ the statement of claim said. Mr Quinlan said he was deprived of pay rises and incentives payments before being sacked under “the false pretext that his position had become redundant’’.

Asked why Mr Quinlan had taken until now to file action, his solicitor Leon Bertrand said it was “due to health issues’’.

A spokeswoman for ERM Power said: “We’re unable to comment on matters that are the subject of legal proceedings.”

Philip St Baker could not be reached for comment.