ASIC cites Shield as part of ‘industrial scale model’
’The Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) has exampled the Shield Master Trust issues as being indicative of “industrial scale models” the regulator is seeing with respect to misconduct around SMSF establishment and property investment.
Just hours after announcing the freezing of assets for two people involved in the Shield Master Trust investigation, ASIC chair, Joe Longo and deputy chair, Sarah Court told Senate Estimates that the Shield Master Trust issue is not the only matter being investigated.
Longo described the Shield Master Trust matter as “very serious” involving large amounts of money and “ordinary Australians being talked into something that really oughtn’t to have occurred.”
“It really is misconduct,” he said.
Court explained that the Shield Master Trust is a registered Managed Investment Scheme (MIS) with Keystone Asset Management as the responsible entity and that ASIC has “extensive concerns about significant superannuation monies being invested into that scheme” and possible mishandling of that money.
She said ASIC’s actions have been extensive around the entities and individuals associated with the scheme.
“We have taken multiple court actions to protect investor funds, we’ve frozen assets, imposed travel restraints, we’ve had receivers and managers appointed – we are at the early stage of what is an extensive investigation,” Court said.
“The kind of figures we are concerned about here are in the order of $480 million of investor funds and 5,800 investors potentially impacted.”
“It’s a major issue and unfortunately it is not the only matter like this we have on our books at the moment,” Court said.
“We’ve been very keen to get out messages to say to potential investors about their superannuation funds ‘be very cautious about transferring your superannuation funds into an SMSF for the purposes of unrealistic property investment returns’.”
“These are industrial scale models that we are seeing,” Court said.
Does anyone in ASIC have social media or google? This was advertised extensively and ignored by ASIC, as was Dixon, the losses sit with ASIC and not other financial planners.
Agreed Fred, even after 60 complaints and a decade of warnings plus an 2016 investigation, ASIC did nothing about Dodgy Dixon’s, except turn up again at the death and dump it onto good Advisers via CSLR.
ASIC are corrupt and useless and will never accept any responsibility let alone any losses.
It’s a sad state when the regulator is not listening or working with key market participants, like Financial Advisers, and Financial Advisers have been made to feel like they’re a rodent to be stomped out. ASIC comes along and freezes the assets after all the damage has been done, and typically after we’ve begged on our hands and knees for ASIC to act. The honest Advisers are just left paying CSLR are then left with those crying Australians helping them get their lives back together, those same investors that were priced out of Advice by those very same regulators.
Reinforces the need for MIS schemes to be included in CSLR, and better allocation of costs back to large product providers rather than small business owners. Also highlights the need to move quicker on these schemes to minimise losses to consumers and ensure sustainability of advice.
It appears whilst ASIC were focussed on chasing honest Advisers over some spelling mistakes or a missed newsletter, (“defective FDS” was the term) in a Fee Disclosure Statement…600,000 Australians in 2023 were scammed and they’ve allowed this to flourish.
Could I suggest we reallocate the staff in what can only be described as the Financial Advice elimination team within ASIC that are oddly the same size policing the Super sector to prevent some of these crimes.
Let’s be straight and I”m talking from experience. If I rang up ASIC and reported that the Shield Master Trust was smelly, they’d tell me to rack off and I’d end up on their hit list. That’s how screwed up this adversarial regulator is. I can only hope someone listens to a poor ripped off investor and takes ASIC to town.
Very well put. ASIC, like all organizations, has limited resources. The issue is it’s focused it’s limited resources on the most insanely pointless areas of the industry. For years now ASIC’s focus has been on the 0.1% of problems before it’s even looked at the 99.9%.