ASIC bags another Wattle promoter
TheAustralian Securities and Investments Commission(ASIC) has netted its fourteenth promoter of the failed Wattle Scheme following the sentencing of a Brisbane-based director on six charges contravening the Corporations Act.
Gold Coast-based Spectrum Fund Administration’s former director William Ross Jackson was convicted in the Brisbane District Court and released after agreeing to a $3000 two-year good behaviour bond.
Jackson had earlier pleaded guilty to six charges of being knowingly concerned in the promotion of prescribed interests, in contravention of the Corporations Act.
The charges relate to Spectrum and six investors who lost at least $145,125 invested in the failed Wattle Scheme. Spectrum received trailing commissions from the Wattle Group of 36 per cent per annum on the funds it sourced from investors.
Back in November 2003, David Christopher Smith, Jackson’s co-director in Spectrum, pleaded guilty to the same six charges, and a further six similar charges.
Smith was sentenced in the Brisbane District Court to a $5000 good behaviour bond for three years.
The Wattle Group was an unlicensed investment scheme operated by Geoffrey Dexter, which raised more than $160 million from over 2,700 Australian investors.
ASIC took action to close down the scheme, and on 7 May 2001 Dexter was convicted of multiple fraud charges and jailed for 10 years.
Back in October four former employees of Gold Coast-based Australasian Management Consultants (AMC) through their association with acting as a sourcing agent for Wattle were sentenced in the Brisbane District Court.
Gold Coast-based Australasian Management Consultants (AMC), in relation to the promotion of the Wattle scheme in contravention of the Corporations Act.
AMC directors Robert Murray Cooper and Brian Michael Wood were both sentenced to 18 months imprisonment but were released immediately on $5000 good behaviour bonds for two years.
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