Spruiker David Catsoulis’s mining outfits pushed into liquidation

Former bankrupt David Catsoulis was for years promising shareholders outlandish returns. Now both of his mining companies are in liquidation.

David Catsoulis from Impact Gold in Papua New Guinea sometime around 2019. Picture: Instagram

Twice-bankrupt mining spruiker David Catsoulis’s trillion-dollar promises across resources projects in Australia and Papua New Guinea appear to have come to naught, with both his mining outfits now in liquidation.

Mr Catsoulis has been raising money through companies Warwick Gold Holdings and Impact Gold (formerly PGL Gold) for about the past five years, promising investors the chance to get in early on projects containing resources, in one case, supposedly worth trillions of dollars.

Both companies have now been put into liquidation in the space of a few months by one creditor entity, with investors in the case of Warwick Gold unlikely to see a return.

Impact Gold – whose directors, including Jack Smit and former Queensland Labor senator Claire Moore, were telling investors as recently as the middle of this year that the company was aiming to pull $2bn worth of gold out of its PNG project by the end of this year – was placed in liquidation by a Queensland court this week.

That $2bn was to translate into $431m for Impact Gold shareholders, who will now have to wait for a liquidator’s report to find out if they will see any money.

Impact has been making similar claims and promises of dividends since 2019, with no dividends paid to date.

There appears to be no evidence that the company ever produced gold at a commercial scale.

Warwick Gold, meanwhile, was placed in liquidation earlier this year, after its ambition to turn an unloved tenement in Queensland into a project containing trillions of dollars worth of precious metals fell over. The company was stripped of the tenement, which it agreed to acquire for a mere $3.5m, after its application to have it transferred was deemed deficient by the Queensland government regulator.

Mr Catsoulis told The Australian at the time that the Queensland government backed him “100 per cent’’, which the government emphatically denied.

The claims of both companies to be the stewards of gold and precious metals projects worth billions if not trillions of dollars were based on exploration results generated with so-called resonance frequency geo-technology (RFGT) – a method not used by reputable mining companies for resource estimation.

In the final report to creditors in the liquidation of Warwick Gold, the liquidator said the process had been hindered by a lack of access to the company’s books, with a solicitor acting for Mr Catsoulis claiming the company’s servers had been hacked “at three locations’’.

“My office has yet to receive sufficient documentation or information to support these claims,’’ the report says.

The liquidator has also been unable to recover 40 tonnes of “precious metal rods” worth more than $13.2m, Mr Catsoulis said in documents filed with the liquidator. These rods were supposedly in Luangiua Village on Ontong Java Atoll in the Solomon Islands – a village so small its streets are not even named by Google Maps.

The rods were supposedly given to Warwick in return for shares issued to previously banned Adelaide company director Colin Oxlade’s company Spice Global Trading.

The liquidator said the rods might be in South Australia, but it had been unable to verify that, and he was liaising with a receiver appointed over the assets of the company prior to his own appointment regarding them.

The liquidator of Warwick said “it is my initial view the company was insolvent from on or around February 23, 2023’’.

“Based on my preliminary investigations, I would estimate that since the date of insolvency, the company incurred debts of approximately $10,361,676.30.

“Accordingly, this amount is the potential claim against the directors for insolvent trading.’’

The liquidator said Warwick appeared not to have raised any significant amounts of money since mid-June 2023.

“Given Mr Catsoulis disclosed … that the company was in the exploration phase of mining, and my investigations have not identified any revenue streams of any significant value available to the company, the company did not appear to have access to sufficient funds to sustain its business operations and repay its increasing liabilities,’’ the liquidator said.

The company’s creditors appear not to have funded any further investigations into the company and its directors, with a resolution passed for the early destruction of its records with the consent of the Australian Securities & Investments Commission.

The liquidator of Impact Gold said it was too early to calculate that company’s asset position at this time.

Mr Catsoulis did not respond to attempts to contact him.

Originally published as Spruiker David Catsoulis’s mining outfits pushed into liquidation