Newton Chan, fomerly of Macquarie Equities, has been jailed after pleading guilty to eight counts of market manipulation of the share price of Bill Express. Mark hawthorne writing at The Sydney Morning Herald has more on this story including this:
He will serve just four months after co-operating with ASIC’s investigation, including handing over a memory stick that he told the court contained a scripted story given to him by Bill Express chief executive Ian Christiansen. ”Your career is in ruins,” said Justice Terence Forrest in sentencing Chan. ”I consider that it is only by the imposition of such a sentence … that others considering manipulating the market in some way will pause to think about the potential consequences of their actions.”
And then this:
Between May 3, 2006, and March 28, 2008, Chan used trading accounts to purchase more than 34 million Bill Express shares worth $6.1 million via 904 transactions. These transactions created an artificial price for Bill Express shares, and helped company directors avoid margin calls.
During his plea hearing, Chan said he performed the transactions on the orders of Mr Christiansen, company accountant Peter Couper and employee Enzo DiDonato.
He said he met the three at a Balwyn coffee shop just weeks before the collapse of Bill Express. Asked if the meeting was ”to get your stories together so that you could each tell the same story to ASIC”, Chan replied ”yes”.
And all the while this share price manipulation was going on, newsagents were suffering still paying off loans taken out to pump tens of millions into Bill Express in 2003.
We were all pretty hard on the ANF when Bill Express went under. Sure, they probably could have done some more due diligence on the company before recommending the deal to newsagents however, how could anyone have known of the clear, deliberate and on-going fraud that was being committed behind the scenes by these crooks.
Steve I agree with that. But I would add that the ANF also failed newsagents as Bill Express was collapsing and it was during this time that evidence of fraud was emerging.
lucky i had a nice fight/ argument and did not sign on bill expreess new screen , so i never had to put up with their nonsense .
Unfortunately, staff at their call centres were treated pretty badly as well.
In my old job, I’d supported a (an imminently) former BE employee back in Melbourne, whose hospital stay and subsequent recovery time was frowned upon by his bosses, and he was sacked in the blink of an eye, despite any advocacy on this guy’s behalf. At that time, the writing was on the wall. In a matter of weeks, systems were down throughout Coles/Shell with no explanation whatsoever for customers.
Chan rolls and gets 4 months, well for that I hope Ian Christiansen and Mr Couper and a few others get to lose their houses and do at least 10 years. It’s far worse than bank robbery what they did.