Tasmanian property developer faces fraud charges over Gold Coast companies

A HOBART strip club operator has been charged with fraud offences totalling $2.32 million in an alleged Ponzi scam on the Gold Coast.

Bradley Keith Silver.

A HOBART strip club operator has been charged with fraud offences totalling $2.32 million in an alleged Ponzi scam on the Gold Coast.

Bradley Keith Silver, 28, of Hobart, was arrested by Australian Federal Police officers at Brisbane Airport on Thursday.

The operator behind Hobart’s Men’s Galley and Launceston’s Show Girls faces seven counts of fraud and six counts of dishonestly using his position as a director.

The charges come after an investigation by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission.

Between 2008 and 2010 Mr Silver was the director of Gold Coast company Capital Growth International Club and associated with All About Property Developments.

In February 2011, the companies were placed into liquidation owing investors — many of them elderly — about $9 million.

The alleged case, where unconventional “low-doc” loans were offered to clients as old as 98, was the subject of a Senate economics committee’s inquiry into bank practices in 2012.

Westpac’s former Pacific Fair home lending manager David St Pierre was sentenced to three years jail earlier this year after pleading guilty to the “calculated” dishonesty when he arranged about $4 million in loans to mainly elderly customers to invest in Capital Growth International Club.

The court heard customers were promised returns of up to 20 per cent a year to invest in CGIC and were told by St Pierre their money was “safe”.

But they lost between $78,000 and $540,000 each after CGIC went into liquidation in 2011.

The 98-year-old lost $440,000 while a 74-year-old male pensioner lost $448,000.

Mr Silver appeared in Brisbane Magistrates Court on Thursday and was released on conditional bail after surrendering his passport.

He is set to appear in court again on August 25.

The Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions is prosecuting the matter.

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