Latest news with #Yowie
AU Financial Review
14-05-2025
- Business
- AU Financial Review
Chocolate Yowies at epicentre of Keybridge-Bolton battle
Confectionary company Yowie has become the unlikely epicentre of a high-stakes feud between investor Nick Bolton and his former activist vehicle Keybridge Capital, which kicked him out and has now complained to the Takeovers Panel over Yowie's plans to issue $500,000 in new shares. Bolton is the chief executive of the $3 million ASX-listed company, whose colourful eponymous chocolates once lined supermarket checkout shelves. On Monday, it said it would issue 34.4 million new shares, in what Bolton's detractors labelled a thinly veiled measure to retain control of the company.
Yahoo
09-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Yowie launches takeover of shareholder Keybridge Capital
Australian confectioner Yowie Group has launched an off-market takeover bid for all the issued fully paid ordinary shares of its largest shareholder Keybridge Capital. In a filing with the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX), Yowie said the proposal is structured as an all-scrip bid, offering one Yowie share for each Keybridge share on issue. The proposed transaction is subject to a minimum acceptance of 50.1% of Keybridge shares, Yowie shareholder approval, and other regulatory clearances, according to an ASX filing today (9 May). The latest announcement comes shortly after a significant legal development involving Melbourne-based Keybridge. On 8 May, the New South Wales Supreme Court of Appeal dismissed an appeal by its executive Nicholas Bolton, affirming the legitimacy of the board installed at the company's general meeting on 10 February. The court's decision, announced in a separate ASX filing, marked the end of Keybridge's period of external administration. Keybridge entered administration on 9 February, following Yowie's demand for repayment of an outstanding A$4.6m ($2.9m) loan by 7 February. The investment firm also cited opposition to new fundraising efforts from its own investor, publicly-listed WAM Active, as a reason for entering administration. WAM had repeatedly gone through Australia's courts to prevent Keybridge from securing new finance. In its administration notice on 10 February, Keybridge said it had been attempting to raise new funds since October last year. WAM's latest attempt to block new financing arrangements was suspended by the Supreme Court of New South Wales on Monday. Keybridge owns circa 78% of the Australia-based chocolate maker after increasing its holding in December 2023. The investor held 23% of the novelty chocolate business's stock back in 2020 before it launched a takeover approach in December 2023, when Keybridge was already the largest shareholder. A deal was finalised in December, whereby Keybridge took its holding to 78.359%. In May 2024, Bolton, a managing director at the investment firm, was appointed as CEO of Yowie. Recent developments have also brought structural changes at Keybridge. Bolton's executive roles have been suspended pending an internal investigation. Additionally, Jesse Hamilton has been appointed as company secretary, replacing John Patton. Yowie, headquartered in Perth in Western Australia, markets its namesake products in Australia and the US to 'promote learning, understanding and engagement with the natural world', featuring Yowie characters such as Rumble and Squish. It outsources production and distribution. "Yowie launches takeover of shareholder Keybridge Capital" was originally created and published by Just Food, a GlobalData owned brand. The information on this site has been included in good faith for general informational purposes only. It is not intended to amount to advice on which you should rely, and we give no representation, warranty or guarantee, whether express or implied as to its accuracy or completeness. You must obtain professional or specialist advice before taking, or refraining from, any action on the basis of the content on our site. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Sydney Morning Herald
08-05-2025
- Sydney Morning Herald
The high-profile private eye kicking in scammers' doors
The bikie knew he was there. Ken Gamble had been staking out the property for hours. Dropped in, under cover of darkness, in his 'Yowie suit' – head-to-toe sniper camouflage from his army reserve days – the private detective had crawled through undergrowth, water, mud, all to within metres of the Rebels clubhouse in remote NSW. 'You couldn't see me unless you fell over me,' Gamble says now with a laugh. But suddenly a bikie was barrelling out of the main house, clutching a hammer, and coming straight for his hiding place. Gamble froze. If he'd had time to think, he might have told the bikie who exactly had hired him. See, Gamble wasn't there to film evidence of the gang dealing in drugs or guns. He had crawled through mud and prickly bushes to catch just one bikie out – for insurance fraud. Today there is an earnestness to Gamble that still doesn't quite see the joke. 'Being of service, helping people, Mum always instilled that in me,' he muses as we sit down to lunch. To Gamble, every job is worthy of busting out the Yowie suit if called for. But what happened next still makes him laugh. Back then, in 1993, the bikies had got in on the insurance fraud boom, a sweeping epidemic of whiplash and nerve damage that Gamble was increasingly tracing to 'staged accidents'. This bikie had raked in $1 million claiming that a crash had crippled him, stopping him from riding his beloved motorbike. Gamble still hadn't caught sight of him, after days of surveillance. But, fortunately, the other bikie racing his way, hammer raised, hadn't actually seen Gamble either. The hammer was to put up a sign at the front of their headquarters. 'Rebels Dubbo Chapter Open Day,' it read. 'All welcome.' Gamble was out of his camouflage and joining the crowds streaming through the front gates in minutes. And when the bikie he had been tracking appeared and hopped onto his bike to show it off for the crowd, Gamble – an early aficionado of the hidden camera 'since Canon came out with a model that could fit in my bum bag' – captured the entire thing. Welcome to the life of a private investigator. You need patience, grit and luck, Gamble says. You have to be friendly and open, trustworthy, but forgettable. 'Don't be suspicious,' he grins as I consider my best neutral PI face. Gamble is all things on his list – it's easy to imagine him flipping crooks to rat on their bosses over a beer or spinning a reassuring excuse for being caught up someone's driveway. But he's not forgettable. At least, not any more. His work on high-profile missing persons cases (such as that of Belgian backpacker Theo Hayez) and now chasing scammers out of cyberspace to their office doors has brought the private eye firmly into the public eye – not to mention his enthusiasm for kicking in those doors on camera. Today he's Australia's best-known freelance detective, with a reputation for hunting the crooks police have given up chasing. Cops and crims alike say Gamble is the last man you'd want on your tail. He spent years cultivating sources in Egypt until he reunited a kidnapped Australian girl with her mother, unravelled the fraud empire of a Beijing Olympics ticket scammer, and hunted down then-fugitive conman Peter Foster to a Port Douglas beach (even helpfully shooting drone footage of Foster's made-for-TV arrest). He was contracted by Paramount Pictures to bust the pirate rings illegally downloading its movies, and once spent days tailing a suspect across time zones and connecting flights. ('Follow a target's shoes, not their face,' he says. 'If you accidentally make eye contact, it's all over.') Today, Gamble teams up with police around the world to raid the 'normal-looking offices' running some of the biggest online scams that target Australians. They're known as boiler rooms – where fraud 'sales crews' trick unsuspecting investors into handing over their cash – but their operations sprawl across multiple departments, from HR to IT. They have sales targets, managers and pictures of family on their desks. And the bikies have got in on this racket too, says Gamble. He's caught 'patched bikies cold-calling [investors]' in Gold Coast boiler rooms, all reading diligently from scripts. He laughs as he describes the confusion on scammers' faces whenever he appears through the swarm of police on those raids, sometimes with a film crew at his shoulder, usually still in his polo shirt and bum bag. 'They must be thinking, 'Who the hell is this guy?' It does feel like being in a James Bond movie,' he says. 'But I wanted to show it was possible to catch them. Everyone says, 'The money's gone – it's offshore, bad luck.' The scammers are good, and our cops underestimate them, but they're not untouchable. 'Australia should be going after this money. It's billions. And getting it back for someone who's lost everything … It can restore a whole life.' Up close, the famous Gamble focus is strangely endearing. He rattles off dates and names with precision, not, he says, because he has an extraordinary memory, but because 'details are everything'. And you never know what clue might become the break in a case. (Or which bikie might invite you into their clubhouse.) Before we even glance at the menu, we're comparing notes on a crook it turns out we've both been investigating. Different name, same face. 'See?' Lunch today is at Melbourne's bustling Sherlock Holmes Inn – because it's named for literature's most famous 'consulting detective' and Gamble made the mistake of insisting I pick the venue. But it turns out the Sherlock in front of me really does have a Watson: his business partner and fellow private eye Allan Watson, who he's been investigating crooks with for more than 30 years, including today at their financial fraud investigation agency IFW Global. This grand old pub is fitting for another reason too – Gamble grew up in a pub. His family took over the Gregory Downs Hotel in Mount Isa ('exactly in the middle of nowhere') when he was 12. His first year of high school was run out of that pub, over radio waves, listening to the tinny voice of Miss Reid and four other kids scattered hundreds of kilometres across the cattle stations while his parents shooed away the local drunks from his study corner. Not for long, though. It was a teenage Ken's job to drive those drunks back out to their stations at the end of the night – a job he says set him up well for his first serious interest: boxing. There are plenty of press clippings to thumb through of a young, sweaty Gamble, boxing glove in the air and medal around his neck. 'My thing was, soon as that bell dinged, I'd race in on attack, catch them off guard,' he says. He had grown up around violence, watching his dad leap across the bar to throw out troublemakers, 'getting into fights myself'. And he was fit from long stretches working on cattle stations from the age of 12, mustering and branding cows, breaking in horses. 'But boxing was a brutal sport,' he says. Recalling a champion title fight he won at 15 in 1982, he sighs. 'The other guy bled a lot.' As the food arrives (steak for me and a succulent roast for Gamble), he talks of his time working as an auxiliary firefighter, and later as an actor (he even played a detective on Water Rats in 2000). But it was the stories of his great uncle Ray, a private eye in the 1960s, which really caught Gamble's interest. 'He'd hand out 'blue slips' for infidelity, leap through windows to photograph people in the act,' he laughs. By the time Gamble joined Ray's old private detective agency, Webster's, in 1988, regulations had tightened. Surveillance required creativity, tricks – even some acting – to lure a subject outside under the lens of a camera. Gamble would pretend to be a confused tradie arriving to rip up a driveway ('Whoops, wrong house!') or a neighbour's friend who had accidentally dropped something in the wrong letterbox. ('Could you just come out and get it for me?') Things could go wrong. He stumbled across secret marijuana plantations, was shot at and attacked. Once, while he was trying to keep a low profile monitoring his target at a bingo night, his trusty hidden camera started making alarming creaking noises. Then, even worse, 'I actually won bingo.' But Gamble enjoyed the more dangerous, remote surveillance jobs. It reminded him of his army reserve training and camping with his dad ('a real bushman'), those summers spent herding cattle and chasing rainstorms. 'They would call me Eddie the Emu because I'd run into the trees and disappear,' he says. 'I ended up metres away from [mafia boss ] Francesco Barbaro on his own land.' He went undercover too, for months at a time, befriending targets to gather intelligence. But Gamble found the betrayal too hard. 'I didn't want to make enemies like that then,' he says. 'These days, I don't care about making enemies. The scammers know I'm after them. But it's upfront.' So, is Peter Foster his Moriarty, his chief nemesis? The investigator's work exposing Foster's weight loss and sports betting scams has led to at least three of Foster's many high-profile arrests. Gamble ticks them off on one hand. ('Crash-tackled. Fell into barbed wire. Crash-tackled on the beach...') The self- described 'international man of mischief' is now out on bail, fighting more fraud charges. Loading 'He's not smart enough [to be Moriarty],' Gamble decides. 'But he is confident. He's a real confidence trickster. He knows how to play the system, get a better deal. 'Still, someone always talks.' Over long lunches like this, Gamble has gleaned a career's worth of intelligence and then some – including, more than once, a warning his own life was in danger. It turns out that the most useful skill of all for a private detective might just be being more fun to have a beer with, being someone you want to help out, someone you trust – at least more than your neighbourhood crime boss. Crooks are no match for a kind country boy? Gamble laughs: 'Thanks, Mum!'
The Age
08-05-2025
- The Age
The high-profile private eye kicking in scammers' doors
The bikie knew he was there. Ken Gamble had been staking out the property for hours. Dropped in, under cover of darkness, in his 'Yowie suit' – head-to-toe sniper camouflage from his army reserve days – the private detective had crawled through undergrowth, water, mud, all to within metres of the Rebels clubhouse in remote NSW. 'You couldn't see me unless you fell over me,' Gamble says now with a laugh. But suddenly a bikie was barrelling out of the main house, clutching a hammer, and coming straight for his hiding place. Gamble froze. If he'd had time to think, he might have told the bikie who exactly had hired him. See, Gamble wasn't there to film evidence of the gang dealing in drugs or guns. He had crawled through mud and prickly bushes to catch just one bikie out – for insurance fraud. Today there is an earnestness to Gamble that still doesn't quite see the joke. 'Being of service, helping people, Mum always instilled that in me,' he muses as we sit down to lunch. To Gamble, every job is worthy of busting out the Yowie suit if called for. But what happened next still makes him laugh. Back then, in 1993, the bikies had got in on the insurance fraud boom, a sweeping epidemic of whiplash and nerve damage that Gamble was increasingly tracing to 'staged accidents'. This bikie had raked in $1 million claiming that a crash had crippled him, stopping him from riding his beloved motorbike. Gamble still hadn't caught sight of him, after days of surveillance. But, fortunately, the other bikie racing his way, hammer raised, hadn't actually seen Gamble either. The hammer was to put up a sign at the front of their headquarters. 'Rebels Dubbo Chapter Open Day,' it read. 'All welcome.' Gamble was out of his camouflage and joining the crowds streaming through the front gates in minutes. And when the bikie he had been tracking appeared and hopped onto his bike to show it off for the crowd, Gamble – an early aficionado of the hidden camera 'since Canon came out with a model that could fit in my bum bag' – captured the entire thing. Welcome to the life of a private investigator. You need patience, grit and luck, Gamble says. You have to be friendly and open, trustworthy, but forgettable. 'Don't be suspicious,' he grins as I consider my best neutral PI face. Gamble is all things on his list – it's easy to imagine him flipping crooks to rat on their bosses over a beer or spinning a reassuring excuse for being caught up someone's driveway. But he's not forgettable. At least, not any more. His work on high-profile missing persons cases (such as that of Belgian backpacker Theo Hayez) and now chasing scammers out of cyberspace to their office doors has brought the private eye firmly into the public eye – not to mention his enthusiasm for kicking in those doors on camera. Today he's Australia's best-known freelance detective, with a reputation for hunting the crooks police have given up chasing. Cops and crims alike say Gamble is the last man you'd want on your tail. He spent years cultivating sources in Egypt until he reunited a kidnapped Australian girl with her mother, unravelled the fraud empire of a Beijing Olympics ticket scammer, and hunted down then-fugitive conman Peter Foster to a Port Douglas beach (even helpfully shooting drone footage of Foster's made-for-TV arrest). He was contracted by Paramount Pictures to bust the pirate rings illegally downloading its movies, and once spent days tailing a suspect across time zones and connecting flights. ('Follow a target's shoes, not their face,' he says. 'If you accidentally make eye contact, it's all over.') Today, Gamble teams up with police around the world to raid the 'normal-looking offices' running some of the biggest online scams that target Australians. They're known as boiler rooms – where fraud 'sales crews' trick unsuspecting investors into handing over their cash – but their operations sprawl across multiple departments, from HR to IT. They have sales targets, managers and pictures of family on their desks. And the bikies have got in on this racket too, says Gamble. He's caught 'patched bikies cold-calling [investors]' in Gold Coast boiler rooms, all reading diligently from scripts. He laughs as he describes the confusion on scammers' faces whenever he appears through the swarm of police on those raids, sometimes with a film crew at his shoulder, usually still in his polo shirt and bum bag. 'They must be thinking, 'Who the hell is this guy?' It does feel like being in a James Bond movie,' he says. 'But I wanted to show it was possible to catch them. Everyone says, 'The money's gone – it's offshore, bad luck.' The scammers are good, and our cops underestimate them, but they're not untouchable. 'Australia should be going after this money. It's billions. And getting it back for someone who's lost everything … It can restore a whole life.' Up close, the famous Gamble focus is strangely endearing. He rattles off dates and names with precision, not, he says, because he has an extraordinary memory, but because 'details are everything'. And you never know what clue might become the break in a case. (Or which bikie might invite you into their clubhouse.) Before we even glance at the menu, we're comparing notes on a crook it turns out we've both been investigating. Different name, same face. 'See?' Lunch today is at Melbourne's bustling Sherlock Holmes Inn – because it's named for literature's most famous 'consulting detective' and Gamble made the mistake of insisting I pick the venue. But it turns out the Sherlock in front of me really does have a Watson: his business partner and fellow private eye Allan Watson, who he's been investigating crooks with for more than 30 years, including today at their financial fraud investigation agency IFW Global. This grand old pub is fitting for another reason too – Gamble grew up in a pub. His family took over the Gregory Downs Hotel in Mount Isa ('exactly in the middle of nowhere') when he was 12. His first year of high school was run out of that pub, over radio waves, listening to the tinny voice of Miss Reid and four other kids scattered hundreds of kilometres across the cattle stations while his parents shooed away the local drunks from his study corner. Not for long, though. It was a teenage Ken's job to drive those drunks back out to their stations at the end of the night – a job he says set him up well for his first serious interest: boxing. There are plenty of press clippings to thumb through of a young, sweaty Gamble, boxing glove in the air and medal around his neck. 'My thing was, soon as that bell dinged, I'd race in on attack, catch them off guard,' he says. He had grown up around violence, watching his dad leap across the bar to throw out troublemakers, 'getting into fights myself'. And he was fit from long stretches working on cattle stations from the age of 12, mustering and branding cows, breaking in horses. 'But boxing was a brutal sport,' he says. Recalling a champion title fight he won at 15 in 1982, he sighs. 'The other guy bled a lot.' As the food arrives (steak for me and a succulent roast for Gamble), he talks of his time working as an auxiliary firefighter, and later as an actor (he even played a detective on Water Rats in 2000). But it was the stories of his great uncle Ray, a private eye in the 1960s, which really caught Gamble's interest. 'He'd hand out 'blue slips' for infidelity, leap through windows to photograph people in the act,' he laughs. By the time Gamble joined Ray's old private detective agency, Webster's, in 1988, regulations had tightened. Surveillance required creativity, tricks – even some acting – to lure a subject outside under the lens of a camera. Gamble would pretend to be a confused tradie arriving to rip up a driveway ('Whoops, wrong house!') or a neighbour's friend who had accidentally dropped something in the wrong letterbox. ('Could you just come out and get it for me?') Things could go wrong. He stumbled across secret marijuana plantations, was shot at and attacked. Once, while he was trying to keep a low profile monitoring his target at a bingo night, his trusty hidden camera started making alarming creaking noises. Then, even worse, 'I actually won bingo.' But Gamble enjoyed the more dangerous, remote surveillance jobs. It reminded him of his army reserve training and camping with his dad ('a real bushman'), those summers spent herding cattle and chasing rainstorms. 'They would call me Eddie the Emu because I'd run into the trees and disappear,' he says. 'I ended up metres away from [mafia boss ] Francesco Barbaro on his own land.' He went undercover too, for months at a time, befriending targets to gather intelligence. But Gamble found the betrayal too hard. 'I didn't want to make enemies like that then,' he says. 'These days, I don't care about making enemies. The scammers know I'm after them. But it's upfront.' So, is Peter Foster his Moriarty, his chief nemesis? The investigator's work exposing Foster's weight loss and sports betting scams has led to at least three of Foster's many high-profile arrests. Gamble ticks them off on one hand. ('Crash-tackled. Fell into barbed wire. Crash-tackled on the beach...') The self- described 'international man of mischief' is now out on bail, fighting more fraud charges. Loading 'He's not smart enough [to be Moriarty],' Gamble decides. 'But he is confident. He's a real confidence trickster. He knows how to play the system, get a better deal. 'Still, someone always talks.' Over long lunches like this, Gamble has gleaned a career's worth of intelligence and then some – including, more than once, a warning his own life was in danger. It turns out that the most useful skill of all for a private detective might just be being more fun to have a beer with, being someone you want to help out, someone you trust – at least more than your neighbourhood crime boss. Crooks are no match for a kind country boy? Gamble laughs: 'Thanks, Mum!'
Yahoo
08-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Yowie US tariffs on China will bring 'significant' impact to costs
Australian confectionery company Yowie Group has warned that newly implemented US tariffs on Chinese goods could will take a hit to its costs. In a market update on the ASX yesterday (7 April), the group said the 54% tariff on Chinese imports to the US 'are likely to have a significant impact on Yowie's cost base". A 10% baseline tariff for all US imports came into effect came into effect over the weekend, with the additional tariffs due to be effective for a long list of countries including China, the UK, Japan and EU, from tomorrow (9 April). In response to the tariffs, Yowie, which markets its "surprise-inside-chocolates" in the US and Australia, said it was exploring alternative sourcing options, including potential toy manufacturing within the US. However, it cautioned that 'there can be no certainty that such arrangements can be implemented'. In February, Perth-based Yowie said it was re-assessing its supply chain due to planned US tariffs on imports from both Canada and China. While the company manufactures its US-distributed products domestically, it sources the packaging and chocolate for its products from Canada and the toys for its chocolates from China. According to its latest filing, Yowie currently spends around US$2.5m annually on toys sourced from China. In addition to the US tariffs impact, the business also warned of a $1.9m hit to annual revenue due to a 'major customer' reducing shelf space as a result of changes in category layouts. It said the reduction in "store facings" was "effective immediately". Yowie did not name the retailer or specify the affected market. In its second-quarter fiscal 2025 revenues were $3m, down from $3.2m a year ago. US sales fell 33% to $2.1m, while Australian sales increased to $0.9m from $0.1m. The ASX filing also included updates on developments related to Yowie's largest shareholder, Keybridge, which entered administration in February. Yowie is a major creditor of Keybridge, with a debt of approximately A$6.7m. A deed of company arrangement has been proposed by Nicholas Bolton, managing director at the investment firm and Yowie CEO since December, the group said. Under the proposed deed, Yowie expects to receive 100 cents in the dollar within 21 days of implementation, pending creditor approval. Separately, WAM Active—a Keybridge stakeholder—is proposing a loan to fund the repayment, although the details and funding capability remain uncertain. Yowie said it 'will continue to assess the proposals and will update shareholders as further information becomes available'. The business also announced several leadership changes. Leo Valle, Yowie's North America country manager, will retire at the end of the month. Meanwhile, Diesel Schwarze and Daniel Agocs have been appointed as independent non-executive directors, since 1 April. Schwarze and Agocs bring experience in brand storytelling, logistics, manufacturing, and sales to support the company's consumer-focused growth and navigate global supply chain challenges, the company said. Yowie added the appointments would look 'to enhance governance, in particular in relation to resolving its recovery of a very material debt from a related party, Keybridge'. "Yowie US tariffs on China will bring 'significant' impact to costs" was originally created and published by Just Food, a GlobalData owned brand. The information on this site has been included in good faith for general informational purposes only. It is not intended to amount to advice on which you should rely, and we give no representation, warranty or guarantee, whether express or implied as to its accuracy or completeness. You must obtain professional or specialist advice before taking, or refraining from, any action on the basis of the content on our site.
