ASIC ban Vardenega for life

Almost three years to the day since the collapse of his Canberra investment busi-nesses, former high profile industry player, Max Vardanega, has been banned for life from practising as a securities dealer or investment adviser.

Almost three years to the day since the collapse of his Canberra investment busi-nesses, former high profile industry player, Max Vardanega, has been banned for life from practising as a securities dealer or investment adviser.

The Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) issued the ban following Vardanega’s conviction for dishonestly obtaining loans worth close to $1.5 million for his company Australian Investment Advisers (AIA).

Vardanega was earlier given a five-year jail sentence suspended on him entering a $5000 self recognisance and serving 52 weekends in detention.

Ron Ladlay, ASIC’s ACT regional commissioner while Vardanega is not currently a representative of any licensee, the banning action was taken to prevent him re-turning to the industry.

“ASIC must ensure that consumers are protected by not allowing individuals con-victed of these types of offences from working in the industry,” Ladlay says.

Vardanega was well known in the investment and financial planning world for his work on developing codes for identifying unlisted collective investments and in-volving Government agencies in recognising the codes.

The codes published by one of Vardanega’s companies, Australian Pacific Invest-ment Register (APIR), in The Yellow Book, became an almost universally accepted industry standard.

APIR was later bought out by former consultant to the company, Andrew Hutch-ings, who developed the codes to cover 4500 active and 3500 terminated unlisted collective investment products.

In September 1997 two of Vardanega’s other businesses AIA and AIA Services were put into liquidation with combined debts totalling more than $2.4 million.