Age reporters Charlotte Grieve and Nick Mckenzie fraudulently entrapped me into sitting down for an ambush interview. Yet I remained calm and politely answered Mckenzie’s questions anyway, until he began making false and unsubstantiated allegation about my bank. I sued Mckenzie, 60 Minutes, The Age, Charlotte Grieve, and Joel Toner for defamation and won a judgement against all five.
The unethical conduct of Mckenzie and Grieve was so egregious that they were incapable of even offering a defense. They had no evidence whatsoever capable of proving the truth of any of the seven defamatory imputations the judge ruled were carried by the broadcast. Mckenzie could not even produce one example of an organized crime figure using my bank, or a single individual or company found to have used my bank for money laundering or tax evasion.
That included Simon Anquetil, the notorious crime figure McKenzie claimed was using my bank. An independent audit confirmed that my bank actually rejected the account application for Plutus Payroll, the Australian company he used to commit his 100 million dollar tax fraud. Anquetil had an account for an unrelated company, which the bank had closed for compliance red flags years before his criminal record was even established and this interview took place.
Operation Atlantis ended without any civil or criminal charges filed against the bank or anyone running it. However, the bad publicity that followed the defamatory broadcast crippled the bank financially, ultimately resulting in local regulators ordering its liquidation due to insufficient regulatory capital.
The court entered a judgment for defamation against all five respondents in my favor, ordering them to pay me $550K in damages, and 60 Minutes and the Age to pay my legal costs on an indemnity basis. This amount was but a tiny fraction of the tens of millions I actually lost, but Australian defamation law severely limited my ability to recover those damages.
For years I tried unsuccessfully to get 60 Minutes to release the unedited video of my nearly fifty-minute long interview, but they refused. I was finally able to compel them to produce a copy in discovery in my lawsuit, and have since posted it on my Youtube Channel. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxqhEvbOpvM
I created this video using portions of the defamatory broadcast the court ordered 60 Minutes to remove from the internet so people could see the deceptive way the interview was edited to deliberately create the false impression that I was guilty of crimes merely because I was being investigated, that I refused to answer questions about my bank and that I had something to hide.
Watch this video and then watch the complete, unedited interview the clips were extracted from to see how unfairly that interview was represented. The clips are all presented in the sequence in which they were actually used in the 28 minute broadcast.
The Nine Network actually went to court seeking an order to restrain me from publishing the unedited interview I got though discovery as they claimed the public should not be allowed to see “the inner workings of a broadcaster..” They withdrew their application and were ordered to pay my costs of the proceeding following an indication from the judge that a ruling could be harmful to the careers of the two journalists.
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