Amarjit Singh’s TV show cancelled

THE high-flying CEO behind a company accused of pocketing millions by preying on the vulnerable students has posted a fiery defence on Facebook.

THE high-flying CEO behind a training company accused of preying on consumers has had his budding TV career put on ice.

Amarjit Singh came to this country in 1998 as a student. Throughout most of the 17 years since, the former journalist, who hailed from a village in Punjab, lived a relatively modest life.

Members of Sydney’s Sikh community say the Singh family’s success in the past few years has been remarkable. “All of a sudden they became wealthy,” said one lawyer. “They shocked the community with that $6 million house.”

At the heart of the Singh success story is a business that now has pocketed nearly $140 million in taxpayers’ money through allegedly misleading conduct by using free laptops to sign up Aboriginal and other vulnerable consumers to $25,000 diploma courses.

In a fiery Facebook post overnight, Mr Singh strongly defended himself, saying he would stay silent on the advice of his lawyers but that he would emerge victorious. He thanked friends for their support and thanked enemies for being “tonic water” giving him strength to fight.

“The man who believes facts after research is better than a person who believes blindly on rumours,” he wrote, urging people not to believe hearsay. “God bless all with prosperity and happiness.”

“Be true to yourself bro don’t worry about people,” one friend posted.

After working for a number of years with CityRail, in 2007 Mr Singh founded Unique International College, offering courses in management, marketing and hairdressing.

From its first class of 16 students in 2008, by mid-2009 Unique had 480 students. Since gaining approval as a VET FEE-HELP provider 2013, Unique has received $139.9 million in Commonwealth funds.

In the 2014-15 financial year alone, Unique enrolled more than 3,600 students was paid approximately $57 million by the Commonwealth. In that period, Unique students had a completion rate of just 2.4 per cent.

Mr Singh, who worked on the high-profile Daily Ajit newspaper as a journalist, was apparently well known for his TV and radio appearances in his home country.

“I think Amarjit just wanted to be famous,” said one former employee of Unique International College, who resigned last year after raising “serious concerns” with the company’s management over the types of students it was enrolling.

Mr Singh founded Unique in 2007.

The Unique International College graduation party.

“A lot of people in India loved him, he was like a movie star,” she said. “He saw himself as a Bollywood movie star.”

Indeed, photos on Unique’s Facebook page, which have since been taken down, once proudly showed Bollywood personalities visiting the tiny college above Silly Willy’s $2 shop in South St, Granville.

Mr Singh has worked hard to establish a similar profile within the local Indian community. As well as hosting disaster relief fundraising events at the then company-owned Kenthurst mansion, since 2006, his family, who also go by the surname Khela, have produced a Punjabi-language community TV show for free-to-air Channel TVS called Apna Punjab TV.

“Apna Panjab TV is a not-for-profit community show produced by Khela family in an effort to serve the community and Punjabi mother tongue,” the YouTube description reads.

“Our main aim is to promote Punjabi and spread harmony, friendship and cultural tolerance among various communities.”

The show, which featured a mixture of community news, interviews and music content, has been airing three times a week since 2006.

Guests over the years included former NSW Premier Nathan Rees, former NSW Minister for Juvenile Justice Barbara Perry, and former NSW Parliament Deputy Speaker Tanya Gadiel.

Members of the Sikh community claim Mr Singh used to promote his training college on the show, but TVS chief executive Rachel Bentley refutes this. “No, not in the program or any actual obvious advertising,” she said.

“He was allowed to have a five-second billboard at the front — as are all producers — that says who sponsors the program. Not actual advertising or paid branded content.”

Ms Bentley said the station had been running repeats since the Khelas stopped producing new episodes several months ago, and the show would be cancelled after this month.

The tiny college collected just under $140 million in government fees.

The ACCC alleges Unique preyed on disadvantaged students.

“It was a pretty low-key show,” she said. “Their programs haven’t been focused on education at all, it was mostly community content and material from overseas. It finishes at the end of this month and we’re not planning to run anymore.”

The Singh brothers, 37-year-old Amarjit and 33-year-old Baljeet Singh, raised eyebrows among some of their thousands of Facebook friends when they gifted each other luxury cars as birthday presents.

“The name ‘Khela’, if you translate it into simple English, more or less you can say it means ‘player’,” laughs one member of the community.

And as recently as May, Mr Singh was mulling writing an autobiography, reaching out to Facebook friends to offer their honest thoughts, Fairfax Media reported. “What do you exactly think of me?” he asked.

“I want to hear your real views about me whether you hate me or like me? It will help me in finishing the current book that I am working on. It will also help me to improve my personality.”

Mr Singh didn’t like what he heard. “I heard you whispering. I knew what you were talking about,” he wrote. “I gave you a few chances to let me know by pretending I knew nothing. But you decided not to.”

The former Unique employee, who described Mr Singh as “always a nice person” and “quite compassionate”, said he would be troubled by the negative attention. “He’s probably thinking, why are they picking on me?” she said.

“I think it’s a shame he’s been made into a spectacle in a lot of ways. It’s a shame everyone’s hounding him when at the end of the day, he’s been enabled to do this by the government. It’s not necessarily his fault. This is part of a much bigger picture.”

She said it was “very important for him to be rich and famous”. “This will devastate him.”

Mr Singh has a taste for the finer things in life.

The $5.8 million Kenthurst mansion once owned by Unique.

ACCC ACTION

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission is seeking the repayment of millions of dollars of government fees paid to Unique College International Pty Ltd.

VET FEE-HELP operates similar to a HECS debt, in that the government pays the cost of the course to the provider upfront, with the student incurring a debt to the Commonwealth.

The ACCC alleges Unique preyed on thousands of disadvantaged consumers, most of whom had limited literacy and English skills, and in some cases suffered from physical and intellectual disabilities.

Many students were simply told to fill out forms and provide their Medicare card, photo ID and tax file number to receive a laptop, without being told they were incurring a lifetime government debt.

In a statement, Mr Singh said the college would “strenuously defend’’ the ACCC action. “Unique has sought at all times to comply with the relevant regulations and standards for private education providers, in the interests of providing our students with quality education and training outcomes,’’ he said.

Mr Singh is the chief executive of the company and co-director with his father, 66-year-old former schoolteacher Manmohan Singh, who is the ultimate shareholder through two companies, Khela Pty Ltd and UIC Development Pty Ltd, which each hold a 50 per cent stake in Unique.

Baljeet Singh is the director of another company, Khela Group of Companies Pty Ltd.

The $5.8 million mansion in Sydney’s Kenthurst, purchased last year by Unique International College, was sold in July to two former members of its executive, Jasmeen Kaur and Mandeep Kang.

Ms Kaur and Ms Kang are both listed as directors of Unique Training Academy, which is separate from Unique International College and is not the subject of the ACCC action.

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Originally published as Amarjit Singh’s TV show cancelled