BREAKING NEWS Thousands of Aussies at risk of losing their superannuation as First Guardian Master Fund collapses
Aussies like Juan Carlos Sanchez were convinced by financial advisory company Venture Egg to move their super savings from ANZ into a fund called AusPrac.
After shifting all his super, Mr Sanchez was told that withdrawals from his fund had been frozen since May 2024.
'When I got that email (from AusPrac advising the superannuation money had been frozen), my stomach dropped — I just had this sick feeling,' he said.
Mr Sanchez later discovered his super was not being reinvested to grow his retirement savings but was being sent into 'a cash hub' controlled by the directors of First Guardian Master Fund.
Mr Sanchez was one of 6,000 Aussies who invested $590million with First Guardian before it collapsed this year.
The Australian Securities and Investments Commission is investigating the company.
Investors were told to put their super into a retail choice superannuation fund and then invest part or all of it into First Guardian.
Falcon Capital Limited was responsible for the failed First Guardian fund.
Its former managing director was David Anderson and ASIC is investigating him after alleging he poured millions of investors' retirement savings into his own failed property developments, craft breweries and to help celebrity chef Scott Pickett, of which he was a shareholder.
The Federal Court has appointed liquidators to Falcon Capital and Mr Anderson's assets have been frozen and passports seized as investigators comb through financial records.
Mr Anderson and another director Simon Selimaj are banned from leaving Australia until 27 February 2026.
'ASIC sought the orders to ensure Mr Anderson and Mr Selimaj remain in Australia to assist ASIC with its investigation and to preserve assets while ASIC's investigation is continuing,' the regulator said.
Public court documents obtained by ABC News revealed Mr Anderson moved $274 million into offshore companies tied to him after he was warned about ASIC's investigation.
ASIC investigators have warned the money will be hard to find.
The regulator also alleged $5.6 million was put into Mr Anderson's personal ANZ account 'without any legitimate basis for payments in that amount being apparent to ASIC or disclosed to investors'.
He allegedly used $16,000 to make a mortgage payment on his multi-million-dollar home.
'Falcon appears to continue to redeploy the limited funds it has received to illiquid investments, despite representations made to investors that it would fulfil redemption requests and reopen the First Guardian Master Fund for investment once the cash receivables are received,' ASIC told the court.
ASIC also alleged Falcon may have deceived stakeholders about the security of their investment and possible returns.
Lawyers for Mr Anderson said 'there have been no findings of fact or law by any court or tribunal, nor by ASIC'.
'Mr Anderson will fully exercise his rights in response to allegations which may be made against him at the appropriate time in the appropriate forum,' Dan Mackay of Mackay Chapman lawyers said.
ASIC found that in the 'best-case scenario' $81 million of investor funds were unaccounted for but accepted the money loaned to overseas businesses may never be recovered.
One investor stands to lose $677,000.
ASIC is also investigating Melbourne-based financial adviser Ferras Merhi who ran Venture Egg Financial Services and led thousands of clients into the First Guardian Fund.
The Federal Court has made interim orders freezing some assets of Mr Mehri who is linked to at least 2,440 clients who invested $179 million in First Guardian funds.
While telling clients to invest in First Guardian, Mr Merhi was also being paid to market the fund.
In court documents it was alleged Mr Mehri received more than $19 million in payments from First Guardian for marketing services.
Small business owner Greg McElherron could lose thousands of dollars and pleaded with the government to step in and protect superannuation investors.
'Everyone is running for the hills trying to cover their backsides. It's absolutely shameful,' he said.
'If you're going to be not only encouraged but mandated to put money into your super, it should be protected.'
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The Guardian
34 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Abuse allegations have prompted distress and outrage - but will Australia's childcare system be fixed?
On Tuesday, Victoria police announced that a 26-year-old childcare worker, Joshua Dale Brown, had been charged with sexually abusing eight children, aged between five months and two years old, in his care. He has been charged with more than 70 offences, among them: the attempted sexual penetration of a child under 12, sexual assault of a child under 16, sexual activity in the presence of a child under 16, and producing child abuse material for use through a carriage service. Authorities contacted about 2,600 families whose children attended 20 childcare centres Brown worked at across Melbourne between January 2017 and May 2025. Distressingly, 1,200 children were advised to undergo testing for sexually transmitted infections. The news has exploded across the country. Politicians have demanded answers and promised action. An urgent safety review has been ordered, new measures to protect children have been announced and calls for a full-scale review of the early childhood education sector has been urged by advocates. Around office lunch tables, at playgrounds as parents watch their children, on social media parenting forums, among experts and politicians, the same questions are being asked: how does such serious and damaging alleged perpetrating happen in a place where children are meant to be safe, allegedly at the hands of someone trusted by thousands of parents to look after their children? And if this alleged perpetrating has been able to occur in a childcare centre, what changes can be made in order for the early childhood education sector to be made safer? 'I can't imagine reading anything worse than 1,200 babies having to be tested for sexually transmitted disease because they might have been infected in the very places that were supposed to care for and educate them,' says Lisa Bryant, a consultant in the early education and care sector. 'It's beyond unthinkable. It's the exact opposite of what these places are supposed to do and I know that so many educators and so many education and care centres would be feeling exactly the same way that I'm feeling.' All of the experts spoken to by Guardian Australia stressed that offending, such as that alleged to have been perpetrated by Brown, is extremely rare, and that the most common place where children experience violence, including sexual violence, is in the home. But Bryant says that abuse of children in early childhood education settings happens 'more regularly than it should' and that issues around workforce makeup, regulation and oversight of the industry have contributed to an environment where perpetrators can commit crimes against children and get away with them. Between 2013 and 2023, the number of early childhood education and care (ECEC) places available to Australian children increased by 50%; at long daycare centres, places increased 69%. In 2023, nearly half of one-year-olds and 90% of four-year-olds attended some form of ECEC, and currently, more than 1m Australian households use childcare. This growth has happened, says Georgie Dent, CEO of The Parenthood, as more women have returned to the workforce, the benefits of early childhood education for childhood development and educational outcomes have been recognised more widely, and due to the 'economic and social reality' that 'it is far more difficult for families to survive on one income than it once was'. But the explosion in the sector has caused issues, Dent says. 'We've seen early education and care grow really rapidly, but I think that we can say that regulation and oversight has not kept up with the pace of that growth,' Dent says. The bodies that regulate ECEC centres – responsible for performing checks to make sure centres are meeting safety and education standards and that workers have appropriate credentials – are run at a state level, with little national oversight. Sign up for Guardian Australia's breaking news email A Productivity Commission report into ECEC, released in September 2024, found that the regulatory system was not functioning as it should. 'We observed that many of the state and territory agencies were very resource-strapped, so we recommended additional resourcing for those agencies,' says Prof Deborah Brennan, an associate commissioner and co-author of the report. 'It is a complicated picture, because we're dealing with eight different jurisdictions, each applying the regulations their own way, but the fact that we have something like 10% of services 'working towards' the national quality standard, is of great concern.' Brennan says that services repeatedly getting scored as 'working towards' the national quality standard – government-set benchmarks for ECEC in Australia – either means that regulators aren't doing the work to get those services up to scratch, or childcare providers are reluctant to work with regulators, because 'there haven't been any consequences in terms of loss of funding'. Complicating the picture, is that while regulation of ECEC happens at a state level, it is largely funded at a federal level, through the childcare subsidy. The federal education minister, Jason Clare, announced this week that the government was preparing to introduce new laws to parliament in the first sitting week, which would prevent childcare providers that are persistently failing to meet minimum standards from opening new centres, and cut off childcare subsidy funding for repeat offender operators and those guilty of egregious breaches. Brennan says that this move by the government was significant, and in keeping with the recommendations of the Productivity Commission. 'I understand that governments and regulators have been cautious about pulling that lever, because it does have immediate and dramatic impacts on families. A lot of services are very big now, so if a service approval is withdrawn you might potentially leave hundreds of families without access to childcare … It's not a simple issue, it has to be done, but it's going to be really complicated.' Sign up to Breaking News Australia Get the most important news as it breaks after newsletter promotion Adding to the complications of the sector is that within ECEC there are various types of care – long daycares, community preschool, family daycares, home-based care and more. Some of these are not-for-profit services, run by community groups or local councils, but the majority – almost 70% of centre-based daycare services – are private for-profit services. Dr Caroline Croser-Barlow, a former senior public servant with experience in early childhood education and CEO of The Front Project, says that for-profit centres have been 'really important in expanding access' to childcare in the last few decades. 'In the 90s, the commonwealth government opened up its funding subsidies to allow for-profit provision and that's because, under the previous model, which only funded not-for-profit provision, it wasn't growing fast enough … And there are also very high quality for-profit providers.' However, the Productivity Commission report found that overall, for-profit providers spent less of their total costs on labour (63% of their overall costs, compared with 77% for the not-for-profit sector), paid staff less (64.3% of staff were paid above award wage, compared with 94.5% of staff at not-for-profits) and fewer of their staff were employed full-time than at not-for profit centres (25% compared with 47%). As a result, the Productivity Commission found lower staff turnover (27% compared with 41%) and lower staff vacancies (9.7% compared with 22%) at not-for-profit centres. Croser-Barlow says that having more full-time staff and better staff retention helps create a safe environment for children. 'It's about embedding child safety in the way you operate your business and I do think that if there is constant change, constant new people in an organisation, obviously that increases the child safety risk.' Bryant is deeply concerned by the casualisation of ECEC, pointing to the fact that more than 50% of the early childhood education workforce have worked in the sector for less than three years. If someone was looking to offend, Bryant says, this casualisation of employment gives them 'the chance to shop amongst services and work out which ones would be the easiest to get away with it, where were the poor sight lines in the centre? Where was the supervision the least? Where would they be likely to be able to get a child by themselves?' Higher rates of casual employees also makes it harder for children to disclose abuse, given they may not recognise or know the name of their abuser, Brennan acknowledges. It also makes it less likely that other employees will report concerns. 'If you have a service where there's a really high proportion of casual employees who come and go, they're going to be much less likely to take the very big step of making a report to authorities,' she says. Part of the reason for a highly casualised workforce is that the ECEC sector faces a critical workforce shortage and high rates of employee turnover and burnout, which that means staffing gaps are frequently plugged with casual employees. 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'Whether that's a national partnership agreement, whether that's an early learning commission, I don't really mind. I just think there needs to be a mechanism that somebody is responsible for the question of improving quality … because at the moment, that's nobody's job. 'The challenge, I think, right up until this last couple of weeks, has always been the early childhood education and care system is very complicated and very hard to put your hands on the levers.' But Croser-Barlow feels that the outrage of the last week, the federal government's willingness to withhold funding from providers, as well as recent announcements from the New South Wales and Victorian governments about introducing CCTV in centres and other security measures, are all signs that people want to take action. 'I genuinely think there is more momentum and real commitment to action than I have seen.'
The Guardian
35 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Albanese heads to China as Trump upends the global order. The PM may wish he lived in less interesting times
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It has fallen to Albanese as prime minister to negotiate a newfound stability in the relationship with Beijing after an acrimonious period which has included a years-long trade and diplomatic deep freeze, lingering bad blood from the Covid-19 pandemic and persistent interference in Australian society. Albanese and his foreign affairs minister, Penny Wong, have succeeded in returning things to a more even keel, promising the two governments will cooperate where they can and disagree where they must. That has meant resisting some public criticism of China, or taking a more measured approach than the media and some commentators demand, including when Chinese warships circumnavigated the country earlier this year, running a live fire exercise that caused dozens of commercial flights to be rerouted. Cooperation with disagreement is a formulation which the government might be privately retrofitting to Australia's other most pressing international priority: managing Donald Trump. 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The Coalition describes it as a major failure, saying the government should have anticipated Trump's win and laid better diplomatic groundwork. The opposition is continuing to demand the prime minister go to the White House and meet with Trump, as if Albanese is somehow sitting at Canberra airport refusing to get on the plane. In reality, an invitation will only be issued when a time of mutual agreement can be secured. Sign up to Breaking News Australia Get the most important news as it breaks after newsletter promotion After her meeting with the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, and their Quad counterparts in Washington this week, Wong confirmed the Americans are eager for a meeting to take place as soon as possible. A September visit to the United Nations general assembly or the Quad leaders' summit in India later in the year are the most likely timing windows, guaranteeing Albanese will hold his second round of face-to-face talks with Xi before he meets Trump for the first time. Labor has been careful to keep its response to the tariffs in check in recent weeks. Trump's 'Liberation Day' announcement turned into an unlikely positive for Albanese during the federal election campaign, and government sources say being included in the list of countries at the 10% baseline rate is as good as things are likely to get. Purported major deals with the United Kingdom and Vietnam might be more hype than substance and Labor won't be the only government hoping Trump might cave on his 9 July deadline and extend the pause on most of the tariffs. Albanese has described the tariffs as an act of economic self-harm, warning American consumers will pay the price for Trump's inflexible belief in import duties. He will stress Australia has a trade surplus with the United States, even as he says the imposition of tariffs is not the act of a friend. Labor sources say privately the government won't push for any major new deal that could undercut the 20-year-old US-Australia free trade agreement. But, as with Xi – described this week by Simon Case, the former head of the UK's civil service, as a 'dictator' intent on causing conflict over Taiwan – careful criticism of Trump may not stand the test of time. He is ramping up extra judicial deportations, going after perceived enemies in the media, abusing political rivals and the leaders of friendly nations, and cutting social programs including health insurance and food stamps to fund the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill. Now law, it is replete with tax cuts for the richest Americans and big corporations and will add trillions to national debt. No one should forget Trump tried to overturn a democratic election, goading his supporters to deadly violence as he attempted to cling to power. If Trump uses the 30-day snap review of Aukus to pull out of the deal, even after Australia has sent about $800m to support the US defence industrial base, Albanese will have a major political crisis on his hands. Australia has structured its defence and foreign policy around the United States alliance for decades and any move by Trump towards his own isolationist instincts would be bad news for allies in the Indo-Pacific and good news for Xi. For Albanese and Labor, cooperating with both Xi and Trump, while disagreeing when Australia must, might be the only good approach. Tom McIlroy is Guardian Australia's chief political correspondent
The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
Who's that girl?: the stolen statue mystery that led from the Gold Coast to Sydney's northern beaches
Someone is stealing the art of the Gold Coast. Not paintings from galleries, but bronze sculptures, bolted to concrete in parks and public spaces. In one of the most brazen incidents, Sun Spirit, a beloved bikini-clad statue by the veteran artist Frank Miles, vanished from its plinth at Currumbin beach during Cyclone Alfred four months ago. Locals believe the noise of the storm camouflaged the rowdy business of separating the 100kg bronze statue from its anchor points with an angle saw. 'I've got four public works on the Gold Coast and three have been stolen,' Miles says. 'One time, they just found the head at a scrap dealer. It looks like they're just taking them for scrap.' Sign up for a weekly email featuring our best reads But in an unexpected second act, the missing Sun Spirit appeared to resurface – almost 1,000km away, lounging by a swimming pool in a real estate listing for a property in Curl Curl, on Sydney's northern beaches. Tipped off by a Gold Coast real estate agent about the Sydney property listing, local surfie Nicka Atkins posted the sighting in a video on his Instagram account. 'Oh my God, are you kidding me? Look, I'm not accusing anybody of anything, but that sure looks like Sun Spirit to me,' he wrote, superimposing his body on to the Sydney real estate listing video. 'To say I've been waiting for this day for a long time is an understatement. Have a look at this … Come on viewers, tell me is that the Sun Spirit statue sitting down in beach in a real estate video right now. Are you kidding me?' The sculpture's apparent reappearance triggered a wave of online speculation and media frenzy. The Gold Coast dining precinct Oxley offered a $5,000 reward for information. Atkins made it on to Nine's The Today Show, offering a reward of two cartons of beer for more information. Soon accusations began to fly against the owners of the Sydney property, Annette and Brett Straatemeier. 'All of a sudden it was just ding, ding, ding – the phone wouldn't stop,' Annette Straatemeier says. 'People were tagging the police, calling us thieves, threatening to come take her back. It was wild.' Amid all the furore, no one contacted the artist or the homeowners – until Atkins himself sent a mate down south to investigate. The Straatemeiers swore they had bought the sculpture from Miles nearly 20 years ago. The artist confirmed the provenance, saying he had cast three Sun Spirits, modelled from his daughter but larger than lifesize, and had sold one to the Sydney couple for $20,000, which they had affectionately named Sheila. The third iteration still stands in his studio. Rather than retreat from the chaos, the Straatemeiers leaned into the moment, looking for a way to transform the misunderstanding into something positive. Longtime supporters of the Starlight Children's Foundation, they decided to donate the sculpture to the Gold Coast council, to take the place of the stolen one, but only if $50,000 could be raised for Starlight. 'We thought, if everyone is so invested in this statue, then let's do something beautiful with it,' Annette said. 'The Gold Coast gets a sculpture back, Starlight raises money for sick kids, and Sheila gets a new life.' A contrite Atkins pledged to lead the fundraising drive. Sign up to Five Great Reads Each week our editors select five of the most interesting, entertaining and thoughtful reads published by Guardian Australia and our international colleagues. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Saturday morning after newsletter promotion 'Annette and Brett are these amazing, wonderful philanthropist people who raise all this money for Starlight Kids Foundation,' he says. 'We've become friends and I'm about to meet them for the first time next week when I come to Sydney, so that's going to be really cool.' 'We've done nothing, really,' Annette says. 'We just wanted to make some good out of a very strange moment. When life gives you lemons, make limoncello.' Miles, nonplussed about the spate of missing public sculptures in recent years, says he is deeply moved by the gesture. 'It's incredibly generous,' he says. 'I think it's a wonderful offer.' With bronze fetching about $4 a kilogram, he believes the thefts are motivated by money. 'It's not about the art for these people – it's about melting it down.' One of his other sculptures, Melody, has survived two attempted thefts, though not unscathed. 'She used to have a bugle,' he says. 'Now she's only got half of one.' The Gold Coast mayor, Tom Tate, declined to discuss the spate of thefts. A Gold Coast councillor, Gail O'Neill, says a large bronze pelican mounted on a timber pole in nearby Robert Neumann Park has also vanished since Sun Spirit's disappearance in February. Gold Coast police say investigations continue.
