Bill Express

The liquidator of Bill Express Limited has sent out a notice of final dividend. The payout is expected to be 0.021 cents in the dollar.

What an end to a saga that cost newsagents tens of millions of dollars.

What a scam if was.

We, like many longer-term newsagents I suspect, received a notice from Pricewaterhouse Coopers, the Liquidators for the failed Bill Express business, announcing an intention to declare a dividend on or around 21 September 2018.

Newsagents wishing to participate in the dividend will need to complete a proof of debt claim and provide documentation by September 19, 2018. This requirement is regardless of p-reviously provided claims as I understand it.

If you are not aware of the Bill Express saga and the cost it imposed on our channel, read the 200+ posts here about it.

The liquidator of OnQ, the parent of the failed Bill Express bill payments platform that cost newsagents tens of millions of dollars, has announced they are set to make a first and final dividend to creditors. You have until September 9 to lodge your proof of debt.

I am a creditor of OnQ as are most newsagents.  The Agreement I signed commits the company to paying rebates as outlined in Schedule D attached to the Agreement.

Update: The ANF responded to this post today not to me but on a forum of their own. While they say newsagents are not creditors, I know of newsagents whop were accepted as creditors at the time the company went down. hence my advice here. Through the links to this post you can see the relationship between Bill Express and OnQ.

I received a creditors report from the administrator of OnQ yesterday. OnQ is the parent company of Bill Express. Both companies were public companies. Both failed.  In this latest report, the administrator proposes a deed of company arrangement through which a backdoor listing business would take control of the OnQ shell. Click here to read the latest OnQ administrators report.

This latest activity is a reminder of the mess of Bill Express and the tens of millions of dollars of newsagent funds lost.

You can read my posts about OnQ here.

The Victorian Appeals Court has sentenced former Bill Express CFO Peter Couper to jail, saying the initial suspended sentence was ‘‘manifestly inadequate’’.

While this is good news, I wish that newsagents could achieve justice for the tens of millions of dollars they poured into Bill Express and associated businesses with nothing of value left to show for it.

The SMH has more on this story. For those new to the newsagency channel click here for some history as it unfolded.

The Liquidators of OnQ are contemplating recapitalisation of the company. They are currently reviewing expressions of interest. This means the corporate carcass of a key part of the Bill Express operation could live on.

Newsagents collectively poured tens of millions of dollars into Bill Express on the back of robust industry association endorsement only to have the value of the bill payment network wiped out overnight in 2008 when the business collapsed amid scandal.

SmartCompany is reporting that Enzo di Donato has received a suspended jail sentence of one year for matters related to Bill Express, the bill payment system promoted to newsagents from 2003 to 2008 by the ANF.

While claiming another scalp is good news for the regulators, they are yet to bring to account enough of those involved in what I’d label a scam that stripped newsagency businesses of more than $70 million.

Newsagents were used to fund other activities of the group. We were pressured to sign leases costing around $25,000 over term for equipment worth just a few thousand dollars. Promises were often made by company representatives that were not fulfilled. The handling of the matter split industry associations and newsagents. While some of us were telling newsagents to stop paying their leases, the ANF advised newsagents to keep paying. The company collapsed around a year after this and outstanding lease payments were not pursued.

There are directors and others of the business who I’d like to see brought to account.

By Jason Bryce

Lawyers representing the Australian Securities and Investment Commission (ASIC) have defended their failure to prosecute the directors of failed payments company Bill Express. ASIC have prosecuted a former financial executive of Bill Express and a share broker who assisted the directors of Bill Express to manipulate the BXP share price in order to help the directors avoid margin calls. Another junior executive associated with Bill Express has pleaded not guilty to charges brought by ASIC and faces court later this month.

Peter Couper, the former chief financial officer of Bill Express’ parent company OnQ was sentenced to 21 months in jail, wholly suspended, in the Victorian County Court on Friday.  Couper pleaded guilty to four charges relating to the falsification of the company accounts, misleading auditors and misleading ASIC investigators.

In sentencing Judge Liz Gaynor recognised that Couper was an employee acting out the directions of his employers, Bill Express chief executive Ian Christiansen and his brother Hal Christiansen, a director.

“You never held shares, you were never a director,” said Gaynor “What you did was at the behest of the Christiansens, in particular Ian Christiansen. The only real benefit to you was the continuation of your employment.”

Gaynor also noted that Couper had agreed to give evidence against another former Bill Express executive, Enzo Di Donato, who has pleaded not guilty to charges relating to the rigging of the Bill Express share price in 2007 and 2008.

Macquarie Equities share trader Newton Chan was convicted and jailed last year on charges relating to the same share trades. Chan received a discounted sentence and served four months in jail after pleading guilty and co-operating with ASIC investigators. Chan gave investigators a USB flash drive containing instructions from Ian Christiansen.

Judge Gaynor noted that the USB flash drive contained instructions to Couper relating to a false purchase and sale of a non-existent mobile phone SIM card software product known as Simex.

The court also heard that Christiansen’s instructions also spelt out what Couper, Di Donato and Chan were to tell ASIC investigators.

Defence barrister Phillip Dunn told the court that finding a bullet hole in his office window was among a number of events that intimidated Peter Couper into following the instructions of the Christiansen brothers.

“This is an unusual case in many ways,” said Dunn who told the court that Couper was not a “high flyer” with a lavish lifestyle” but a “suburban accountant from Wantirna.”

“He was paid and salaried, he had no bonus, no shares, he was a servant of the organisation.”

Crown prosecutor Mark Gibson, representing ASIC, told the court that a prosecution of Ian Christiansen was unlikely because it would have to rely on the testimony of confessed perjurers  Peter Couper and Newton Chan.

ASIC banned Ian Christiansen from managing a corporation for five years in March last year. His brother Hal Christiansen died in July 2008.

Newton Chan’s former employer, Macquarie Equities, is being sued for more than $10 million by Saudi corporate giant Al Othman over the manipulation of the Bill Express share price.

Between 2005 and 2008, Bill Express had a turnover of about $1billion per year mainly from the sale of phone cards and mobile phone recharge vouchers sold through 14,000 terminals in newsagencies and other retail outlets.

Following the collapse of Bill Express in 2008, Peter Couper and Enzo Di Donato were both employed by Activ8Me, a satellite broadband provider controlled by another former Bill Express identity Sandro Di Donato.

In 2007 companies related to Bill Express purchased small Adelaide based ISP Activ8Me which obtained authority under the Australian Broadband Guarantee to connect rural customers to government subsidised satellite broadband services after Bill Express provided written guarantees for Activ8Me.

In September 2011, Activ8Me was licensed by NBN Co. to provide satellite broadband billing services.

I am grateful to freelance journalist Jason Bryce for providing such a comprehensive report for publishing here. The insights in this report go beyond reports published elsewhere.

Ah, it’s been a while. Bill Express was in the news last week with a report in the Fairfax media about court action commenced by the Al-Othman group over their investment in Bill Express. The Bull has a bit more on this.

Reading the reports reminded me of the many millions of dollars lost by newsagents and the disaster it was for the channel on the back of no due diligence by those who led the channel into the investment.

If you don’t know what I am talking about, click here for my Bill Express coverage.

Further to my post of a few days ago, I have written to the Communications Minister to express concerns about activ8me being involved in the NBN given the pedigree of the company and the damage they and those associated with them wreaked on the newsagency channel through Bill Express.

Newsagents were lied to by those selling Bill Express into our businesses when they got us to sign five year agreements, often based on false and misleading information.  We were let down by the organisation itself through its management of its affairs.

The cost to our channel of the Bill Express mess was tens of millions of dollars.

activ8me is one of the companies tied up with the Bill Express mess and they have been announced as a seller of NBN satellite and some other services. Technology Spectator has the story.

For a bit of background on activa8me and where it sat within the Bill Express mess click here.  For more on Bill Express, click on the link to the right.

While I’m no lawyer, I would have thought that there were enough concerns on the tale regarding the lineage of activ8me for it to not be part of the NBN story.  But, hey, maybe it’s all been cleaned up…

On Tuesday, ASIC revealed that on March 17 it had banned Ian Christiansen, a former director of Bill Express, from managing a company for five years.  I suspect that the same fate would have befallen Ian’s brother Hal had he been alive today.  Fairfax papers have the story.  No news yet on the fate of Julian Little, the Bill Express director who managed the relationship with newsagency.

Newsagents sunk more than fifty million dollars into Bill Express, signing five year agreements.

There were complaint of false and misleading information being used to get newsagents to sign these long term agreements. Nothing ever came of complaints about tactics used in the field to get newsagents to sign what we now know to be unfair and grossly expensive five year agreements.

Bill Express was promoted to newsagents by the ANF.  The ANF got a commission from Bill Express.  The ANF Board endorsed Bill Express in 2003 with lavish promotion and support, having done no due diligence on the company or its offer.  In 2008, when Bill Express was collapsing, the then ANF Board continued to support Bill Express, providing advice to newsagents to continue to pay for Bill Express equipment without seeking legal advice as to the appropriateness of this advice.

The behavior of the ANF in 2003 and in 2008 damaged the organisation.  The ANF today is not the ANF of 2003 or 2008 thankfully for newsagents.

Go into the back room of many newsagencies and you will find some of the old Bill Express hardware stored away.

As ASIC and others work through their processes and put the Bill Express mess to bed, maybe newsagents can too.  It is truly time to move on.  the past is the past.

ASIC last week based Sandro DiDonato from being a director for four years because of matters relating to the collapse of Bill Express and OnQ.  Check out the report in The Sydney Morning Herald.

I June 2008 I blogged about Sandro DiDonato and his role in a web of companies related to Bill Express.

It will be interesting to see if any of the Bill Express directors are ever held accountable.

Newsagents lost millions of dollars from Bill Express,  They were led into the bill payment business by the ANF without any due diligence and buckled in the face of high pressure selling techniques – locking them into five year contracts.

Peter Couper, the former Chief Financial Officer of the company and OnQ, is facing criminal charges according to a report in The Age this morning.  The report indicates that others will be charged as well.

While there is still no solid news for newsagents in relation to the Bill Express equipment, my (non lawyer) opinion is that the equipment has been abandoned and can therefore be used how and where I like.

The only other closure I would like is into the behaviour of the ANF Board leading up and immediately after the decision to endorse Bill Express.  The due diligence the ANF claimed to have done was not done and no one has been held accountable for letting so many newsagents down.

The Age is reporting that a criminal investigation into Bill Express executives is under way thanks to evidence gathered in the recent liquidators hearings.

While there will be no economic joy for newsagents from this, those who feel ripped off by the whole Bill Express saga will derive some comfort that those in control of the company are being pursued.

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.

I am surprised to see the ANF involvemed in a project which aims to use Bill Express screens in newsagencies for advertising, especially since there is no disclosure, at this stage, of the commercial benefit for the ANF.  Given the ANF ivolvement in promoting Bill Express to newsagents from 2003 and the millions its collapse cost newsagents, I would have thought that transparency on this new project would have been a wise move.

Click here to see the fax received by newsagents from Wow-vision media network about the screens.

Banking Day has a couple of excellent reports from yesterday and last week on the latest from the investigation into the collapse of the company being held in the Supreme Court of Victoria.  Each day of the hearing has shown that newsagents were just a small part of a major financial scam.

Bill Express funded the entrepreneurial visions and dreams of its chief executive, Ian Christiansen and his late brother Hal Chistiansen, the Supreme Court of Victoria heard yesterday.

Profit results were created and funding was also provided to Australian Private Networks (a private company that now trades as Activ8Me, Australia’s largest satellite broadband provider) in a convoluted funding arrangement relying on cash from the “Arabian Highway”.

Click here for  a free trial to Banking Day to get the rest of the article.

Once can’t help but wonder whether independent due diligence into Bill Express before it was promoted to newsagents would have uncovered the now obvious flaws in the business model.  We will never know.  No such due diligence was undertaken on behalf of newsagents.

Mark Hawthorne continues his excellent reporting of the liquidators examination of the Bill Express mess in The Age today.  It is amazing how people who appeared to be at the centre of the company, signing documents, being the public face etc now say that they were being told what to do by others, one of whom is now dead.

None of the public examination helps newsagents deal with the equipment they have and the money they paid under the advice of the ANF long after legal advice had been provided that such payments should not have been made.  Those issues will never be resolved.

I received a copy the annual report from the liquidator of On Q (a Bill Express related party) this week.  It details a situation as messy as that being investigated by the Bill Express liquidator.  The report documents some suspected voidable transactions, what look like questionable loans, a question about possible insolvent trading and a raft of poor practices.  They are pushing for a public examination.

While there is nothing in the report for newsagents, it is interesting to see the On Q mess through to the end.

The Herald Sun ran a story on Bill Express yesterday on page 87.  This adds to the excellent coverage in The Age over over recent months.  Yesterday’s story focused on the evidence of Julian Little and the treatment of a loan provided ot him by the company and paid out by the company.

My understanding is that it is rare for an examination of the details we are seeing of the Bill Express mess to take place.

While we won’t get to the bottom of the tactics used to get newsagents to sign up for what now appears to have been a ponzi-type scheme or those close to newsagents who may have made money from this, it is comforting to see the Directors of the company and some associated with them under scrutiny.

Fpr those wanting an update on the Bill Express investigation in the Supreme Court, click here for the report on yesterday’s proceedings.  It’s all about Julian Little, the Bill Express Director who drove the relationship between the ANF, newsagents and Bill Express.