A few weeks ago Sarah Danckert a journalist from the Age Newspaper wrote the following article.
Sarah explains how Mark Kawecki was charged for 'cooking' IPO's. That is to say Kawecki used false information (made up company names) to meet the ASX listing criteria for IPO's. Mark was a client of the stockbroker Bell Potter.
To list a company on the ASX, promoters need a minimum of 300 non affiliated investors. Listing rules can be easily bent and it's not uncommon for promoters to just make a few company names up to get the minimum number. That is what has happened here. Many of these IPO's are just scams to make money for the promoters and directors as many of us know.
I believe the problem is much more widespread and serious than what Sarah's article suggests and any investor who has been burnt by a pump and dump stock should take notice of this. Many of these pump and dump companies should never have been allowed to list. I believe that ASIC and the ASX have known about this problem for a long time and ignored it.
I have in my possession 7 company share registers. Shareholders from the following companies have all received letters from me, Indiore, Environmental Clean Technologies, Legacy Iron Ore and Devine Ltd. Plus I hold three other registers which I obtained to communicate with those shareholders.
Mark Kawecki is in 4 of those registers. There he is 30 times in the Indiore share register. Indiore is a classic pump and dump stock. I could prove this in any number of ways. They misled shareholders for ten years about iron ore reserves which weren't there. The company should never have existed. If it never existed those shareholders wouldn't have lost their money.
Mark Kawecki is in the Devine share register 64 times. Wow. Here are some of his company names.
Life Advice PTY LTD, Life Coaching PTY LTD, Finance Strategists PTY LTD, Financial Planning Strategists PTY LTD, Foreign Exchange Arbitrage PTY LTD, Forex Arbitrage PTY LTD, Funding Strategists PTY LTD......... The list goes on. They are all made up company names and if Sarah's article is correct and ASIC were correct, these made up company names are there just to satisfy the minimum requirements for IPO's.
In the Buderim Group Kawecki is listed 7 times. In Environmental clean technologies, 3 times. Not one of his companies (Life Advice , Life coaching etc) holds more than 10 shares. 1 share, 4 shares, 9 shares. There seems no purpose to all these companies other than to make up the numbers.
Or to take part in share purchase plans. I'll let you decide. I sent my evidence to both ASIC and the ASX. I received no satisfying response from ASIC but I received from the ASX an email to assure me there was no IPO 'cooking' going on here just some share purchase plan rorting.
What is a share purchase plan? It is when a company wants to raise capital so they issue new shares (up to $15,000 each) at a heavily discounted share price to every shareholder on the register. So theoretically someone who has 64 accounts on the register can apply for 64 x $15,000 = $960,000.
I can see the possibility of that. But that does not explain why ASIC has charged Kawecki for the IPO 'cooking'. If he was rorting share purchase plans why didn't they say so. Something smells here.
Mark Kawecki is not the only one with many companies in the share registers.
There is a fund manager that has 43 companies in Legacy Iron Ore, 42 in Devine Ltd, 32 in Capral Ltd, 6 in Indiore, 6 in Buderim Group and 4 in Red Metal Ltd. In every case the number of shares each company owned by the fund manager is 1.
I cannot explain why this fund manager has all these accounts with 1 share because their other investing strategies seem genuine. However these 1 share accounts seem anything but genuine. Here are some of the names of the accounts owned by this fund manager.
Yamba Yamba PTY LTD, Snap That Pty Ltd, Rockette Pty Ltd, Red 335 Pty Ltd, RearView Pty Ltd, Positive Gear Pty Ltd, Options Brad Pty ltd, Nicaragua Pty Ltd, Mwah Mwah Pty Ltd, etc etc...
These seven share registers I obtained are random companies because they are companies I had purchased over the years purely on valuation and share price. To think that Kawecki and this fund manager are so featured in these seven registers, they must be there throughout the majority of share registers on the ASX.
The fund manager was also quite careful in hiding their identity. To trace who they were I needed to do ASIC extracts of the company names. The fund manager is reasonably well known with quite a few articles recently about them.
There is one more character who is featured throughout the share registers. This name I keep close to my chest. This identity is well respected in the academ community as well as in the financial field. I rang this person and asked why he has all these accounts in all the share registers with only a few shares in each account. He was quite shocked that I knew. Rather angrily he said he was doing it to attend AGM's. Then why does he need more than one account in each ASX company? This person is well connected within ASIC, ASX and Chi-X and to be honest I'm not quite willing to name him.
What does all this open up? We already know how many dishonest practices there are for those who prefer to earn their money the easy way and this is just another of those. But really how many failed IPO's that have burnt investors should never have been given the green light in the first place?
My evidence has been shown to The Age, The ABC, The Australian and the Australian Financial Review and so far no-one has taken up the story.
Contact: devinechanges2018@gmail.com