Why did ITSA not act accordingly when they received complaints about this shonk?
The reason ITSA refuses to act is because Adam Toma is also on the take.....
Kiss my Arse Adam Toma!!!!!!!
THE jailing last month of disgraced insolvency specialist Stuart Karim Ariff draws a line of sorts under a tawdry period of Australia’s white-collar crime history.
But it would be wrong to say the six-year sentence handed out to Ariff in the Supreme Court – he will be eligible for parole from March 2015 – is the end of the matter.
For some of Ariff’s victims – the people from whom he stole while being in a licensed position of trust – his conviction and jailing on fraud charges amount to little more than a beginning.
A good start, but by no means the finish, because as far as they are concerned, Ariff has potentially millions of dollars in assets salted away, and they intend to find them.
Normally, a seasoned observer would describe such a pursuit as a quixotic folly. Ariff was declared bankrupt in October 2009 and the historic record of creditors pursuing bankrupts over allegedly hidden assets is not a pretty one.
But the Ariff affair is no ordinary story of white-collar crime. To many people, white-collar crime is less serious than physical robbery, for example. When the money is stolen from large corporations, some are tempted to say the theft is a ‘‘victimless’’ crime. Nobody was hurt. Insurance will pay for it. That sort of thing.
But the crimes of Stuart Ariff were anything but victimless. In most of the cases that have come to light, Ariff has deliberately and systematically stolen from people. Real people. Some of them might have been people with more assets and wealth than the average Australian working for wages but they were hardly the big end of town.
Wyong man Brian Mitchell had a car yard and another business next door when he turned to Ariff for accountancy help in 2006.
Mitchell said Ariff convinced him to put the business into administration, which he did, only to find himself locked out of the yard by a hostile Ariff.
The theft was so brazen that Mitchell had trouble convincing anyone that Ariff had done the things he did.
Sadly, the Mitchell saga was repeated, in various forms over a number of years before the authorities finally caught up with Ariff.
In this light, it was the sheer audacity of Ariff’s crimes that made them – on first hearing – almost unbelievable.
Mitchell said he remained angry at what happened to him and said he was part of a group that hoped to sue Ariff – or anyone else they could find culpable – with the aim of recovering millions of dollars in stolen money, lost earnings and damages for what they had suffered.
Others – particularly Newcastle businessman Bill Doherty and CarLovers director Ian Fong – are beyond angry.
Doherty, in particular, has made the pursuit of Ariff his life’s work in recent years, and he has developed an encyclopaedic knowledge of the insolvency industry and the circles that Ariff moved in.
Crucially, Doherty said that Ariff did not act alone in his systematic reign of theft and fraud. He is not the only one.
Sydney Morning Herald reporter Adele Ferguson was, along with staff of this newspaper, among the first journalists to write about Ariff.
It would take the Australian Securities and Investments Commission – which has admitted receiving complaints from as far back as 2005 – until 2007 to move against him.
In an article after Ariff was sentenced, Ferguson wrote that his victims had ‘‘every right to feel let down by a system that continues to take the easy way out and turn a blind eye to the continued operation of a circle of Ariff’s mates who helped him build his insolvency business’’.
When the authorities finally did move on Ariff, the response included a Senate inquiry into the insolvency industry, which spent much of its time on the reasons that ASIC took so long to twig to Ariff’s crimes.
Its 190-page report was published in September 2010, was highly critical of ASIC and made for disturbing reading.
Committee member and National Party NSW Senator John Williams, who was instrumental in securing the inquiry, said he believed he had seen enough of Ariff and his cohorts to justify calling for a Royal Commission into white-collar crime.
Following the Senate inquiry, the federal Treasury has begun working on plans to ‘‘modernise and harmonise’’ the insolvency industry.
An options paper was published in June and a follow-up proposals paper came out on December 14.Doherty said he had little faith in the Treasury proposals, arguing they all but ignored the criticism of ASIC made by the Senate inquiry and by 80 of the 100 or so submissions to it.
‘‘Senator Williams receives at least one complaint a week about these cowboys,’’ Doherty said.
‘‘When will the government wake up? Will it really take a Royal Commission into white-collar crime to clear things up? I hope so!’’
In the meantime, anyone considering a submission to the Treasury paper has until February 3.
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